


love in idleness

by peggycarterisacat



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Jealous Keith (Voltron), Light Angst, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Oblivious Keith (Voltron), Past Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Pining Shiro (Voltron), Valentine's Day, also Lance tries the love potion For Science and is temporarily infatuated with Shiro, i know it's like december just roll with it, rated T but there's a bit of swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21905989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peggycarterisacat/pseuds/peggycarterisacat
Summary: When Keith accidentally takes a love potion, he doesn't understand why all his friends are so freaked out about it. The potion was defective. It was supposed to make him fall in love with Shiro, and his feelings for Shiro haven't changed at all.But Shiro refuses to come anywhere near him until the potion wears off. Everyone else insists on proving that it's actually working, resulting in a love-potioned Lance who won't shut up about how pretty Shiro is. Yet Shiro's more tolerant of that than of any hint of affection from Keith.Keith's not jealous. Jealousy is pointless, and it doesn't matter anyway. He's not in love with Shiro. Is he?
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 271
Collections: Sheith Big Bang 2019





	love in idleness

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the 2019 Sheith Big Bang! My partner is shadowedplums ([ tumblr,](https://shadowedplums.tumblr.com/post/189814841260/heres-my-piece-for-the-sheithbigbang) [twitter](https://twitter.com/shadowedplums/status/1208853420066533376)) who made some beautiful art to go along with it! It'll be embedded in the story and linked again at the end. 
> 
> (pretty much everyone is in Gryffindor here - it's not how I'd actually sort them, but I wanted everyone to hang out in the same dorm so that's how it is!)
> 
> love-in-idleness is the flower that was used to make the love potion in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Keith never held any particular love for holidays — they were lonely things, when you didn't have anyone to spend them with — but even then, Valentine's Day was his least favorite. One day meant nothing; if you had someone to love, every day should be precious. The holiday itself was sappy, performative, and, worst of all, stressed Shiro out.

There Shiro was, sitting on their usual sofa in the Gryffindor common room and wearing a thin smile. Next to him, in Keith's usual spot, was a fourth year — Keith narrowed his eyes and stepped fully through the portrait door, letting it swing shut behind him. Her hand was on Shiro's arm, and Keith wanted to remove it.

If Keith could follow him around all day, growling like something feral whenever someone stepped out of bounds, he would. Shiro would disapprove, though. Patience and focus were his mantras. That was all well and good, but Keith held Shiro's comfort paramount and had no problem with being a bit of an asshole about it.

He stalked up behind the two of them and scratched his fingertips through the soft, short hair of Shiro's undercut. Shiro relaxed into the touch, tipping his head back to give Keith one of his soft smiles; Keith smoothed his fluffy forelock back to better see Shiro's warm grey eyes.

The fourth year — whose name Keith had never learned and didn't care to recall — inched away. _That's right,_ he thought, satisfied. The wild thing inside him let its hackles down, but he didn't bother biting back a sharp grin.

"Hey," he said, giving his attention back where it belonged.

"Hey," Shiro answered, softly. He trapped Keith’s hand against his hair, and the corners of his eyes creased in a a genuine smile. "We, ah. We have plans," he explained to the fourth year, but she was already on the move, leaving a heart-shaped card in Shiro's hand and beating a hasty retreat.

"Ready to go up?" Keith asked. Their plans weren't romantic, of course, but none of Shiro's admirers needed to know that. Keith didn't mind the misconception, especially if it got people to leave Shiro alone.

"Yeah," Shiro said, gathering up his overstuffed bag. Relief softened his face with every step they took away from the crowded common room. 

Keith followed him closely up the stairs, a shield between him and the world's prying eyes, with an encouraging hand at his back. Shiro leaned into the touch, forever tactile.

Their plans were a repeat of last year's — too short to be a newly formed tradition between the two of them, but not unfamiliar. Last year, Valentine's Day came on the heels of The Breakup. _'We wanted different things long-term,'_ was the explanation Shiro gave, and he was still friendly with Adam even though they didn't hang out together anymore. Still, that didn't make the emotions disappear overnight, much as Shiro liked to pretend otherwise.

There were still bruises, things Shiro didn't confide in anyone, but his many admirers didn't care about that. To them, Shiro's pain was an opportunity to sweep in with promises and condolences and false comfort. Shiro was too kind — he turned them down softly and returned to the tower that night with his bag stuffed full of cards and gifts, almost as heavy as his heart. Not a single one of them was for Shiro's own sake.

So Keith did what he could. His stormy presence chased away even the most persistent, and then in the evening he convinced Shiro to lie down in a nest of pillows he built. He plopped Black onto Shiro's chest and stroked her to a rumbling purr, then quietly opened everything so he could dispose of the inappropriately gushy cards before Shiro had a chance to read them and feel guilty. Shiro unloaded all the guilt-chocolate, as he called it, onto Keith, who devoured it without an ounce of remorse. 

Then Shiro still wrote a fucking thank you note to each one of them — reserved enough to dissuade, yet full of compassionate reassurances. There wasn't a single person in the castle unknown to him. He remembered their names, their virtues, their strengths, and he fully believed that each of them would find a happiness tailored to suit them.

That had to be _exhausting._

This was already a marked improvement over last year, though. Shiro's eyes were still a little downcast, but he wasn't trudging like he was carrying all the world's expectations on his shoulders. Last year, Keith managed to get a few tired smiles out of Shiro — if this kind of support was what he needed again, Keith would just have to outdo himself. New goal: make Shiro _laugh._

Shiro's laugh was one of the most precious sounds in the world, but too rarely heard in recent years. Ever since he became prefect and quidditch captain, seriousness settled on his shoulders like a shroud. Maybe those were good qualities for leadership, but Keith missed the days when Shiro let himself enjoy life unrestrained.

Well, some things would always change with time. Others wouldn't — Shiro would always be different from the rest, their friendship old and unconditional and ever-present. He was the first person to look at Keith and see something worthwhile, especially when Keith couldn't see it in himself.

Another galling part of the holiday: friendship wasn't any less important than other forms of love. It was all Keith really knew, and he'd learned the hard way, when he was too young, not to take things for granted. Now, Keith wanted to be someone Shiro could rely on — not some kid in need of guidance. Not anymore.

Shiro needed someone to rely on now. Even as he pushed his dormitory door open, he let out a breath too heavy to be a sigh. “It’s been a long day,” he said. 

"Yeah," Keith agreed, stealing the overstuffed bag off of Shiro's shoulder as he was still taking off his shoes. He escaped to Shiro's bed with it, toeing his own shoes off along the way, before Shiro could catch up.

Shiro, with an exaggerated grumble ruined by his fond smile, arranged the discarded shoes in line with his own before coming to join him.

"Nope," Keith said, elbowing Shiro in the ribs as he leaned over to fish around in the bag, but Shiro ignored him to retrieve some slightly squished flowers.

With a wave of his wand, he revived them to their bright, perky glory. The effect was, unfortunately, ruined half a second later when Keith tackled him to get them back. Shiro must not have been expecting it — Keith knocked an _oof_ out of his chest and sent him tumbling into his pillows, narrowly missing the perfect circle of void sleeping there. Black rumbled unhappily at the disturbance, flicked her ears back flat against her head, and opened her golden eyes.

"I'm so sorry, baby," Shiro crooned in the voice he reserved especially for soft, fuzzy things, smoothing his hands over her mussed fur.

A pointed thud came from the other side of the room — Keith looked up to see Matt standing from his desk, hand splayed dramatically over the cover of the textbook he'd just slammed shut.

"Nope. I'm not sticking around for this. Have fun," he said, re-rolling a long scroll of parchment, gathering up his books, and stomping away.

Keith glanced down to see Shiro, pinkening cheeks half hidden behind the hand he slowly dragged down his own face, as if he could scrub the embarrassment away with pure willpower. He bit his lip to stifle a giggle, and Shiro's blush deepened even further.

Matt paused at the threshold just to hit them with a final "Seriously, though? Right in front of me?" before he slammed the door.

"Oh my god," Shiro whispered, and Keith dissolved into ugly, snorting laughter on his chest, the kind that left him breathless and teary-eyed. Shiro's hand rubbed soothing circles into his shoulder.

When Keith could breathe again, he crawled out of Shiro's lap and pushed himself upright on the bed. "Did he think you were talking to me?"

Shiro groaned and squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm not gonna hear the end of this for a while."

"Probably." Keith took advantage of his despair to snatch the flowers from his hands. "Stay there," he warned, attempting a threatening gesture with the lopsided bouquet. Shiro held his hands up in surrender, but the softness in his eyes said Keith had completely failed to be intimidating.

He also didn't know what to do next. He'd been focused on his immediate goal — relieving Shiro of any unnecessary obligations — and he hadn't thought any further ahead. There wasn't a vase, and Shiro was the better conjurer, but Shiro was exactly where he should be, relaxed on the bed with a soft smile, scratching Black's ears. Keith placed one fallen petal precisely on Black's tiny forehead. She wasn't annoyed enough to open her eyes, but the tip of her tail lashed out, ruffling Shiro's hair.

"I know it stresses you out, feeling like you've disappointed people." Keith busied his hands with the rest of the flowers, attempting to re-shape the squished blooms with his hands. An entire blossom had broken away from the stem; Shiro wasn't irritated like Black was when Keith put it on his forehead, making the two of them a matched pair. Soft pink petals against shiny black hair. "I don't feel at all guilty about rejecting people, so let me take care of this for you."

Some part of that had worked; Shiro still looked stretched thin with tiredness, but he was smiling with his eyes again. "You break a lot of hearts this year, then?"

Keith quietly arranged the rest of the flowers in a halo around Shiro's head. Someone left him a card this year, but he hadn't had a chance to open it. Was he a heartbreaker if he never read it? "Nah," he decided, tucking the last one behind Shiro's ear.

The card couldn't have meant much to whoever left it there. They hadn't thought it important enough to do in person, and Keith only had a handful of people he actually talked to. None of them should be interested in him on a romantic holiday. So it was from someone with access to Gryffindor Tower, but not someone he knew well — he wasn't about to go out with just anyone who paid him attention, but this was the first time anyone had tried to give him anything. That was worthy of some token curiosity, but his interest ended there.

"Oh, Keith." Shiro sat halfway up to curl an arm around Keith in a clumsy hug, and the flower fell off his head. "I was joking, but— No one gave you anything?"

"No, someone did." With exaggerated movements, Keith pushed Shiro back down with a hand on his chest. "Stop moving. You're ruining my masterpiece."

"Oh," Shiro said quietly as he settled back to stillness. His lips moved haltingly, like he wanted to say something but couldn't decide on the words. He scratched Black's cheek instead, and Keith started on the stack of cards. 

The very first one was borderline sexual harassment. Keith started a 'no' pile far from Shiro's reach — he was only allowed to see the cute or funny ones, none of the gross ones or the gushy, passionate stuff that would leave him lying there feeling awful. The younger students were good for that, innocent crushes that Shiro could gently redirect with little guilt. 

The next one was not one of those. It had extra pages inside — hundreds of effusive words written in tiny, cramped handwriting — so that was a no. A couple envelopes later, Keith regretted his earlier thought that at least they weren't muggles, at least there wouldn't be any dick pics in the mix. He shredded the entire 'no' pile to start anew. At least muggle dick pics generally didn't _move._

"Hey." Shiro lightly touched his thigh. "I'm happy for you."

"Thanks," Keith said absently, finally opening a card that wasn't awful. He didn't recognize the name but, then again, he'd stopped trying to keep track of the incoming first years' names midway through second year. "Look, she drew Black."

"Oh, hey," Shiro said to the cat, taking the card from Keith. "You have an admirer."

"Yeah, these're all for you," Keith added. "Who'd want to give anything to _Shiro?_ He's not as—" Keith was about to say _not as cute,_ but Shiro was holding the card up in front of Black's face, as if she'd ever care to look at it. He was pretty cute. "Not as soft."

"See? It's you," he was saying, but she ignored him, yawning and putting her head back down on her paws. "You're right," Shiro said solemnly. "She didn't get your whiskers right."

"You're such a dork," Keith snickered, shredding yet another letter he was never gonna let Shiro read and ripping open the next. Gross pick up line — nope. Lipstick kiss-mark — sorry, not interested.

He paused at the next one and glanced up, careful to keep his face neutral. "Hey, Shiro. Are you a dementor?"

"What?"

"Because you take my breath away."

That won pink-dusted cheeks and a raised eyebrow. "Wouldn't I have to kiss you first?" 

“Like I’d let you,” Keith said, reaching for the next envelope. He’d been working on his Patronus, which was so close to corporeal that he could almost taste it. Big, clawed paws, and lots of fur. Still a bunch of things it could be, though, and he was antsy to find out. 

Keith squinted at the next note, written half in spell incantations and full of implication… What did they mean by Accio? Oh. _Come._ Keith tore that one in half before tossing it onto the 'no' pile.

The last red envelope turned out to be a Howler, which serenaded them with _Never Gonna Give You Up_ as performed by Rizavi and Kinkade, then ignited in Keith's hands. He dropped it, cursing, and hurried to extinguish the flames while Shiro laughed himself to tears.

"See if I ever open your mail for you again," Keith muttered, sucking on his singed fingers but quietly pleased at the smile on Shiro's face. Rickrolls were his favorite muggle meme.

When Shiro looked up, his eyes widened at the sight. He worried too much. "Are you okay?" he asked, sitting up and tugging at Keith's wrist.

Keith popped his fingers out of his mouth. "It's not—" _It's not that bad,_ he was going to say, but he stopped protesting when Shiro began to examine his hands. It was nothing special — or it shouldn't be, anyway. Keith was more than capable of tending to his own minor injuries, but there was something nice about being cared for and something captivating about Shiro's hands on his. Something warm and sweet and slow that took his breath away for real, no dementors required.

Shiro rummaged around in a desk drawer; he was the responsible one of the group, not because he did any less stupid bullshit than the rest of them, but because he kept first aid supplies on hand. He selected a jar of cooling gel and carefully massaged it into Keith's fingers — Keith didn't trust just anyone to help him, to let himself be vulnerable. Shiro, though… Shiro's attention made him feel special, valued. His ministrations instantly eased the pain to a prickling tingle, leaving the burned skin stained an unnatural shade of lavender. The discolored spots would shrink as they healed.

Shiro didn't put his hands down immediately, and Keith didn't point out that he could have done this by himself. "Thanks," he said instead, reluctantly tearing his eyes away to look up.

"I expected my dignity to be the only casualty today," Shiro said, frowning as he wiped his hands clean. His cheeks were still tinted pink — was he that upset? "I'll talk to Nadia and Ryan about sending Howlers—"

"Nope. It made you laugh." Keith stretched out his hands and wiggled his fingers at Shiro. "I can sacrifice some fingers to your shitty sense of humor."

"Keith—"

"No feeling bad. I'm fine."

"If you say so," Shiro relented, though Keith could tell he wasn't happy about it. He began to sift through the little packages and candy boxes dumped on his bed. "Still— don't touch anything for like five minutes. Let it work."

Keith could agree to that. The cards were done and those were the worst part, so he settled back further on Shiro's ridiculously soft bed.

Shiro started carefully peeling the wrapping paper apart at the seams. "Thank you for being here with me. I know this is a weird way to cope with something that's not that big a deal in the first place, but… it really helps."

"If it bugs you, it's a big deal to me."

"I know. And you know it's the same for me, right?"

Keith just smiled in response. No, he didn't know, not in those exact words. He'd _hoped,_ but it would only hurt Shiro to know that he'd doubted. Everything was too good to be true, and sometimes Keith still feared he'd wake up back in foster home #2, that the past five years were nothing but a dream. That there was nowhere he belonged and no one who truly wanted him.

From the sad way Shiro looked at him then, maybe he already suspected. "Say if you want to try anything," he offered, instead of prodding further.

Keith shrugged. It was one of the things Shiro was particularly good at, noticing when Keith wasn't yet ready to speak. He didn't know enough about what he liked, and it was kind of embarrassing. His early childhood was rich in love, but little else — and now he didn't even have that. There was a yearly allowance from the scholarship fund that was meant to pay for his school supplies, and if he was smart about his purchases, he could save whatever was left. Never enough that he wanted to spend it on frivolous things like candy. A broom of his own would be nice, someday, but he knew that after he graduated he would be fully on his own.

"I'll try just about anything."

"Believe me, I know." Shiro held a piece of chocolate to Keith's lips.

Keith opened his mouth automatically to take what Shiro gave him — smooth chocolate melting on his tongue and sweet, sticky caramel bursting from the center. Shiro's fingertips brushed against his lip, soft as silk, as he pulled his hand away. It might have been accidental, but Keith was staring dumbly up at Shiro's face at that moment and saw him lick his own lips.

Heat rushed to Keith's cheeks and he didn't understand _why._

By the time Keith finished chewing through the caramel, Shiro was studying the array of boxes again and he was left at a loss. Shiro had said something he felt compelled to reply to, but he couldn't remember what it was — not compared to the lingering sensation of Shiro's fingers ghosting across his lips and the intensity of having all of Shiro's attention focused on him.

"You like these ones, right?" Shiro asked, holding up a different box.

By the time all the lavender spots faded from Keith's skin, he'd only rejected one chocolate Shiro offered — a mint one, which firmly reminded Keith of muggle toothpaste. Shiro'd popped it into his own mouth with a shrug.

He looked more relaxed now; the time away from the rest of the world and its expectations did him good. Soft bed, purring cat, smiling Shiro with a sprig of flowers still tucked behind his ear. There wasn't anywhere Keith would rather be.

He snagged a candy Shiro would like — dark chocolate filled with something light and fluffy — and held it up. After a moment's hesitation, Shiro bent his head to take it, and Keith felt the brush of his mouth against his hand. His brain worked too slowly. He left his hand hovering there, only a breath away from Shiro's face, long enough to be awkward, and Shiro caught him at it.

Before he could pull away, Shiro's hand covered his and pressed Keith's palm to his cheek. His gaze carried the weight of his full attention again — normally a comforting thing, but Shiro looked almost nervous. "Keith, I—"

The dorm door opened with a sharp click, and Shiro stopped. He sat up straight and his hand fell back to his side; Keith's followed suit more slowly. "Allura," he greeted her as she crossed the room, but Keith knew who it was without looking. No one else's footsteps were as quick and precise.

Her weight settled onto the mattress somewhere behind Keith, and he finally looked over. She picked up an empty candy wrapper between her thumb and forefinger, and held it up for inspection before her severe frown.

"That answers my first question," she said, mostly to herself. "There's a rumor going around that someone dosed one of your gifts with a love potion," she explained. "Do either of you feel any effects?"

Keith's attention darted back to Shiro — his hard-won contentment vanished.

"Not me," Keith said, shaking his head slowly, and just a bit of Shiro's new distress eased away.

"Not me, either," he confirmed.

Allura nodded, but her expression didn't lighten at all. "We should find out for certain if this is a rumor or not. If it isn't..." Anyone who thought Allura was harmless just because she was pretty and polite was an idiot. "Well. We'll find out when we get there."

  
  


* * *

Allura's demeanor completely changed when she was angry or focused on a task. Mix the two together and people were diving out of her path, giving the three of them a wide berth down the halls — even the same people who were usually dazed by her presence. She hated that kind of attention. "There is _one_ veela in my family six generations back. It should not be enough to have any effect," she complained on more than one occasion.

It didn't make sense, the way people dehumanized the ones they claimed to admire. The way they pressed their affections forward despite Allura's discomfort, Shiro's disinterest.

"Professor Slav won't mind if we use his classroom," she said, her words clipped short as she led them down to the dungeons.

True, but only because Slav would never find out unless one of them said something. As far as Keith was aware, the potions master hadn't been out of his quarters today. Something about white flowers in groups of three at certain phases of the moon, and rather than face certain doom Slav elected to leave instructions on the blackboard and allow his classes to self-monitor for the day. He pulled something like this at least a couple of times a month — how he got away with it, Keith had no idea. Slav's job was to teach, not to be brilliant and paranoid for its own sake.

On the flip side — the classroom was free for the taking, and already bustling with activity when they arrived.

Hunk sat before a bubbling cauldron, already halfway through something with Lance acting as his sous-chef, hunting down and measuring ingredients from Slav's extensive, but chaotically organized shelves. On a fundamental level, Slav was opposed to alphabetizing. 

An array of books floated in the air, cycling like a Ferris wheel as Pidge and Matt moved synchronously through them — flipping through this book, cross-referencing with that. No surprise there — Pidge met him on the muggle side one summer so that she could use his library card to get on the internet for the first time. She was absolutely the kind of person to have fifty tabs open at once, and her reading habits reflected that. 

Their chatter moved faster than Keith could follow, conjecturing on theories unknown to the rest of them.

"I confiscated some from the Weasley shop earlier," Allura said darkly. She'd conjured dainty china plates and was arranging chocolates from each box upon them. "I can't believe this sort of thing is legal to sell."

"Same," Lance said, like a hypocrite. "That's so fucked up. You shouldn’t mess around with love."

Keith couldn't resist retorting. "Really? That's not what you were saying this morning, _Loverboy Lance."_ He cleanly sliced a chocolate in half.

Allura's brows dipped into a severe frown and she shot a hard look across the table, sharp and accurate as a knife. Lance's voice came out an octave higher than normal, trying to backpedal. "What! No, I was saying _you_ need all the help you can get."

Some days, Keith had to take a deep breath and consciously remind himself that Lance was his friend now. Today was one of those days.

One more reason Valentine's Day was Keith's least favorite holiday: though he and Lance slowly came to understand each other better over the years, this was an occasion Lance still tried to make into a competition. It was completely stupid, but Lance's constant prodding drove him defensive. Lance paraded each gift and card he received past Keith's nose, annoyingly smug, and then there were his little comments—

"I mean, if you had like, dozens of people falling at your feet, I could maybe understand you not noticing someone _right in front of your face—"_

It wasn't a competition. Keith didn't _care_ about any of it — dating, gifts, romance — but he still had to bite back the urge to snap back that he _did_ receive something, actually. It would only invite more nagging and prodding and needling.

"Sorry, Lance. You're not my type," Keith said instead, just to throw him off. He didn't know if he had a type — one more thing that didn't matter, because pretty people weren't any nicer than everyone else — but that was a thing people said, right?

It worked. Lance sputtered that _of course_ he didn't mean _he_ was interested in Keith, and Shiro looked up from the chocolate frogs he was herding back onto the plates. He hit the hopping candies with a freezing charm and met Keith's eye with a little half-smirk. It was a good look on him — a different facet to his confidence, one that wasn't compressed into a shape palatable to anyone else who might be watching. He came back over to Keith's side and laid one of his huge hands on Keith's shoulder.

"Ready to get started?" Shiro asked, quietly enough that the words were only for Keith.

Keith peered at the table, eyeing each cluster of candy. His answer hardly mattered, but he hummed an affirmative anyway.

Matt cleared his throat. “Right, then. You guys did Amortentia in class, right?" he asked, barely looking up from the three books he was juggling. "The smell thing is common to all love potions — the other details are more complicated, but we'll look at that later. For now — anyone smell something that shouldn't be there?"

Amortentia, the strongest love potion in the world. They'd learned about that one a couple weeks ago, and Keith found it to be a profoundly underwhelming experience. It was supposed to smell different to each person, reflecting their inner desires by taking on the scent of the things each individual found most attractive — but Keith didn't smell anything unusual. Nothing he could put an exact name to, anyway, unlike Hunk who immediately named a couple of spices. Or Lance, who spent about five minutes rambling out something that belonged on the side of a perfume bottle, with notes and undertones, or maybe it was overtones, or _whatever._ He'd even tried to debate with Keith what exactly was in the mix when they weren't smelling the same thing — and what the fuck was bergamot, anyway?

If Keith concentrated all his attention on his sense of smell, he could pick out a few things — something brisk, like fresh wind in his face; a whiff of shampoo, the same kind that Shiro used; and sweat. Not in a gross way, but a hint of salt and something else deeply familiar.

Someone once told him — perhaps in a muggle science class, when he was very young — that smell was the sense most strongly connected to memory. More familiar than the scent itself was the feeling it stirred throughout his body. A sense of pavlovian calm swept through him, diaphragm to lungs to a deeply exhaled breath, and a heady buzz trickled down from his brain, tingling across his face. Excitement, laughter, the adrenaline rush of flight; warm tiredness, loose muscles, and the kind of fuzzy high that's only earned through exertion.

Concentrating the same way now, he could detect the faintest hint of it in the air, but he couldn't trace it to one location. Allura and Lance were the only others really trying — Pidge and Matt probably wouldn't leave their books unless the rest of them couldn't figure it out on their own, and Hunk's might be difficult to identify among a couple dozen types of chocolate. But Shiro was just standing there, watching Allura humor Lance, who was presenting her own plates back to her complete with dramatic flourishes.

Keith circled around to Shiro. "I can smell something," he said — it was stronger on this side of the table, but he couldn’t pin it down to a plate. "But I don't know where it's coming from."

"Yeah, not surprising," Hunk said. At the same time, Matt cleared his throat. Keith looked up; they were both pointedly looking to his left. At Shiro.

"But I can't— ohhhhhh." Now Lance was looking at them, too. "Yeah. Okay. That makes sense."

Maybe it did — Keith's sense of smell was a little better than average, he thought. "Can you smell anything?" he asked Shiro, who hadn't weighed in yet.

"Yeah," was all Shiro said, not even looking at Keith. That single, dismissive word hit Keith right in the gut and twisted. He reached out, then second-guessed it, but it was as if Shiro sensed the movement by some sixth sense. He glanced down, saw Keith's hand awkwardly hovering in the air for that moment, and after half a second's hesitation linked their hands together and gently squeezed. The sensation was grounding, easing away his visceral fear that he'd finally done something to drive Shiro away. 

"Oh!" Allura, at the other end of the table, had reached right over Lance to select a plate on her own. "I think it's this one."

It couldn't be — Keith had eaten one of the chocolate covered strawberries and he was definitely not in love with anyone.

"Oh, yup, same," Lance said. Like he'd never agreed with Allura just for the hell of it before.

But then Hunk agreed, too, and Pidge, and Matt. Even Shiro took a sniff from the plate and nodded grimly, and then passed it to Keith.

The smell was there, but it wasn't the strongest thing in the room. "Sorta." Keith shrugged. He couldn't figure out where the other source was. "That one's not it, though. I don't feel any different."

"It definitely is," Pidge countered. "It's faint, but it smells... The way the earth smells, after it rains."

"Motor oil," Matt added. "That does _not_ belong on a chocolate strawberry." 

If that was it, he felt more offended than anything. Someone fixated on Shiro enough to try to _drug_ him, but they didn't even know that he thought fruit and chocolate combined were an abomination against nature?

"Keith." Shiro looked at him, the realization turning to horror. "You ate that one."

"Yeah, I know," Keith shrugged. "I feel fine."

"Everything'll be okay," Shiro said, like he'd only heard half of Keith's words. His hands landed heavily on Keith's shoulders, and his thumbs rubbed circles into Keith's back. He felt _fine,_ but this was nice, too. "We'll find who did this. You can stay in our dorm and I'll keep everyone away until we figure it out, or find an antidote, or something."

Keith's eyes had closed, like a cat being scratched behind the ears. He forced them open again. He needed to look Shiro in the eye and make him understand— "Shiro, I'm fine. It must not have been all of them in the box. I don't need you to hide me away like some princess in a tower."

"I didn't mean it like that," Shiro said soothingly, and Keith believed him. "I just want you to be safe. Someone could try to take advantage of you like this."

It was a hell of an adjustment, knowing that someone in the world genuinely cared about his safety. "They won't. They were going after you, they won't want me."

"Keith…" Shiro's mouth opened and closed like he couldn't decide on words. "People like you. A lot more than you think."

Keith didn’t think Shiro was full of shit, exactly. His eyes met Keith’s with open sincerity, and Keith softened. Shiro just had a rosier outlook on the world, in general, and Keith would never stop being a sap for it. 

"Nooooot that that's an excuse to try to assault anyone or anything," Matt said, rolling his eyes. "Back to the problem of the day, if Keith doesn't feel anything yet, we can rule out a few options. It's not the Weasleys' formula, that one takes effect within minutes. There are some that work on a longer delay."

"Or, to take this another direction, it might have neutralized itself," Pidge added. "Not all recipes work the same — some are like polyjuice, you have to put toenails or something in so it knows who the target's supposed to fall in love with—"

Keith, the only one of them raised fully in the muggle world, cringed. He had to force himself to dissociate before he could drink that kind of stuff — lacewing flies and beetle eyes, yalmor claws and snargaluff pods — but it was totally normal to the people who grew up with it.

She continued— "Others are more complicated, but they're unstable. If it's not used exactly the way it's intended, it can get confused and start producing weird results."

Shiro's eyebrows pitched towards each other in thought. "Why would they use one of those? Why would anyone make a more complicated potion that's less likely to work?"

"They're harder to trace."

"Then it was one of those," Shiro said, grim.

"I dunno, man," Hunk said, fiddling with the end of his tie. "The further you chase that snidget, the more complicated they get. They'd have to brew this themselves. It would be a lot of effort."

"Exactly. It's one thing to buy a potion at a joke shop on a whim. This was premeditated. So, trying to think of the kind of person who would do this…"

"I just... can't think from that perspective," Allura said, rubbing at her temples. "I don't understand what they would want, if it was not genuine. If it would only fade." That moment of weariness drained from her, replaced by hard determination. "When we find out who did this, I _will_ be recommending expulsion to the headmaster."

Part of Keith expected Shiro to demur at the idea of expulsion — he and Allura both wore leadership naturally, but Shiro was the more lenient of the two, the one who always advocated for second chances. He and Keith wouldn't be friends, otherwise.

But Shiro said, in a tone even sharper than the one he used to direct quidditch drills, "Only if I don't get to them first." Shiro's large hand slipped down from Keith's shoulder to his waist and squeezed, more roughly than he probably intended. It sent a shiver down Keith's spine — he was _mad_ in a way Keith had never seen before, eyebrows arranged in a hard line, all warmth gone from his face.

So it would be a three-way race, then; Keith couldn't abide any attempt to harm Shiro. Luckily, Keith was faster than both of them.

"Well, we can't figure out who did it without figuring out what this is," Pidge said briskly. The others returned to their tasks, Hunk explaining his potion for identifying ingredients in other potions — it was a layer of abstraction away from what Keith could easily process, and he was too agitated to stand and listen. Pidge noticed him fidgeting in place, as she usually did. "Wanna help?" she asked, gesturing at her books.

Keith inclined his head. Flipping through pages was better than nothing, but Shiro still had a firm hold on his waist and Keith didn't want to leave the radius of his touch. If Shiro found it comforting to hold onto him, Keith wouldn't move no matter how restless he got.

Pidge rolled her eyes and sent him a stack of books with a flick of her wrist. They floated delicately through the air to his side, despite the rough gesture. "If you want to make something powerful, there's a trade-off between simplicity in technique and the power of the ingredients required. Find the ones you think you could make — we might be able to identify it if it uses a really weird ingredient."

"Ouch," Keith said, but started flipping through the pages anyway.

"You know what I mean," she groused, and he did. She had no intent to harm; it was just that her brain sped along magnitudes faster than her mouth ever could, and the niceties sometimes got lost in translation.

Of their group, Keith was the worst at potions. Contrary to half their teachers' assumptions, it wasn't because he was stupid or didn't know how. It was literal agony to sit still for that long, counting how many times to stir the cauldron anti-clockwise and the number of seconds between drops of weblum sludge. His grade fluctuated around Acceptable because he consistently fucked up in class but tested well.

_Patience yields focus,_ Shiro had told him around a dozen times. At first, he thought it was some kind of faux-zen bullshit, but, as it turned out, Shiro wasn't faux-anything. It was good advice, even though Keith only wanted to fully apply it to things he would actually _use._ His life goals involved exactly zero potion-making, but he'd mostly stopped blowing things up, so he counted that as a win.

But now he had plenty of incentive to focus, even if it was his least favorite subject.

"And _where_ are they gonna find any super weird ingredients? Unless you're saying they've been planning this since Christmas."

"Owl order?" Hunk suggested.

"Could've stolen them." Shiro nodded at the locked door to Slav's storage room, where he kept the more uncommon ingredients. "If they were the type to worry about morality, we wouldn't be here." His fingers involuntarily curled into a fist, catching Keith's shirt and drawing him half an inch closer.

Keith went with it, leaning into Shiro's side. He didn't wear his worry for the world to see, but today it was obvious in the set of his mouth. Keith reached up to neaten the forever-messy tuft of hair that was now falling into Shiro's eyes. A little jolt, half a second of tension, traveled through Shiro's body, apparent only to Keith where they touched. He wasn't good at being reassuring, but sometimes it was enough — if his hand lingered a little, it was because Shiro let out a soft breath and leaned minutely into the touch.

Lance's voice cut through the moment. "Yeah right, like they could use _anything_ from Slav's supply closet," he scoffed, tipping his chair back on two legs. "He keeps everything filled to the same damn level, he would notice if anything went missing. Remember that time we tried that thing with the nifflers and— holy _cheese!"_ The chair clattered to the stone floor as he stumbled upright and vaulted over the workbench, narrowly avoiding collision with an empty cauldron. "No one's been in there for like four _days."_

"Huh. Yeah," Hunk agreed. "He refuses to open that door on prime number dates because it's bad luck, _and_ he had class upstairs on the 12th because 87% of the time the dungeons collapse or whatever. And today he hasn't been out of his quarters, whatever about flowers."

Shiro closed his eyes, and Keith could tell he was counting backwards from ten. Slav had the unique ability to truly test his patience. It was kinda funny, kinda worrying. 

Lance tried an _alohomora_ and yanked on the door handle. It didn't budge. Slav — brilliant, paranoid genius that he was — used more advanced spellwork than that, but it was nothing Keith couldn't handle. Over the course of five years of Shiro's friendship, he'd gotten a lot of practice with locking spells of various complexities; the golden boy archetype people saw in Shiro came from his sparkling charm, raw talent, and genuine hard work. That image of him made those same people forget exactly how much time Shiro spent in detention back before they started putting effort into not being caught.

Keith bit back a smirk and felt out the edges of the spell. He was the fastest and most practiced at picking these apart — once you figured out how to visualize it, unraveling the more advanced locking spells was remarkably similar to picking muggle locks. He'd learned that skill back in foster home #3, his first summer back from Hogwarts. They'd taken one look at his "occult" books and locked his entire trunk away, stealing Keith's only tie to a world he knew was better, a place where he was more than an unwanted burden, an abandoned freak. Removing his only reassurance that he hadn't dreamed it all up, that he would return come September. That he'd meet Shiro again.

He released the final strand of spellwork in concert with another of Lance's tugs on the handle; the door swung open and smacked into his forehead. It wasn't intentional, but Keith turned his head against Shiro's shoulder to disguise the snort of laughter he couldn't hold back.

"Be nice," Shiro whispered, punctuating with a sharp squeeze of Keith's hip.

"I'm always nice," Keith whispered back. "I helped him open the door, didn't I?"

"Found 'em." Lance stuck his head out of the closet and waggled a jar in their direction. It was about half-full of small white buds. "Whatever they are."

"Heartsease violas. Right. I saw those in—" Pidge summoned a book that rushed to her palm with a slap. "Three crushed heartsease violas, cured under the light of a full moon. All within the right timeframe."

Hunk confirmed, by testing a chunk of strawberry against the sample flower, that this was the potion they were dealing with.

"Bad news first— we can't figure out who did it. This one works kind of like… you know wand loyalty, how wands know who disarmed you?" Did _anyone_ actually understand wand lore? "It's kinda like that. The transference of possession is kind of nebulous, and those've changed hands too many times to figure out who originally enchanted it. But, good news! Keith shouldn't be affected since he just took one and no one _gave_ it—" 

Shiro's arms dropped away and he jumped back, out of reach. His absence left a chill on Keith's skin. "No. _I_ gave that one to him."

"How definitely?" Pidge dove back into the book, while Matt just looked at them judgingly. "Did you physically hand the box to him, or verbally tell him he could take one?"

"I, uh. I fed it to him."

The room went quiet. Everyone was looking at them, but there was nothing… They hadn't done anything wrong?

"His hands were dirty," Shiro protested with little conviction.

Allura fixed them with a thoroughly unimpressed look; it was weird being on the receiving end of a look usually reserved for Lance. _"That's_ what you were doing when I walked in?" she demanded. "Lounging in bed feeding each other chocolate?"

"Wait, _in bed??"_ Lance squawked.

Hunk's eyes darted back and forth between them, lightly cringing. "Not gonna lie, guys. That's kinda weird."

Shiro gave one more token protest, but Keith could see he was losing steam. "It wasn't like that—"

"He was really stressed out," Keith filled in.

Pidge laughed outright. "How else do you help Shiro deal with stress?" she asked, smirking. 

"Don't ask," Matt groaned.

Keith frowned. He made sure Shiro remembered to eat, even when that meant risking Kolivan's wrath to sneak food into the library while Shiro was studying. He didn't want to find out how literal the words _knowledge or death_ were, but Shiro was worth the risk. When Shiro was ruminating over something, Keith dragged him out after curfew to fly by the light of the moon. When he needed to just _be,_ away from everyone else, they went up to the astronomy tower to quietly watch the stars.

Then there were the nights they fell asleep together. It wasn't intentional — Keith might be a light sleeper, but he could fall asleep just about anywhere. Including Shiro's bed when they stayed up late studying. Any noise or movement would stir him awake, but he could drift off again just as quickly once he determined what had disturbed him. When it was Shiro covering him with a blanket... Shiro was good. Shiro was _safe._ Keith caught his wrist once before he moved away, and they woke the next morning cuddled up together, both of them better rested than usual. Maybe it was a little weird, but there was nothing wrong with some platonic cuddling between friends.

"Is it affecting him or not?" Shiro asked, trying to drag them all back to the point. Pink dashed over his cheeks to the tips of his ears.

"Theoretically, yes."

"And is there an antidote?"

"Yeah, but it takes like a week to brew. This'll wear off in 12 to 24 hours, you're gonna have to wait it out."

Shiro looked, if anything, more distressed. "I'm so sorry, Keith— I'll stay in my room the rest of the night. This is my fault, you shouldn't have to do anything differently just to avoid me—"

"Why would I need to avoid you?" Keith asked. "That love potion must've been a dud, I don't feel anything for you."

That must've come out wrong. Shiro, always tall and broad and sure of himself, wilted like a daisy in the desert. Hunk patted him on the back consolingly, but it didn't do anything to bolster him back to confidence.

Keith ran the words through his head again, but Pidge's voice cut off that train of thought. "You don't feel _anything,_ or you don't feel _different?"_

"...both?" Keith guessed. "I feel exactly the same as I did yesterday."

"Keith. Please don't take this the wrong way, but you're not always in touch with your emotions," Allura said, so smoothly that it was difficult to take offense. "You're supposed to be in love with Shiro right now. Is there any reason you could be in love with him, but feel exactly the same as you usually do?"

Keith blinked, his brain twirling away like a carnival ride gone rogue. Was that a trick question? Was he missing something? "Because the potion didn't work?"

“Are you serious?” Matt groaned. "My soul just vacated my body. I can't— I _can't."_

Pidge snickered. "I'd call a dementor but I bet you'd make it sick."

"Keith, perhaps the love potion didn't work as expected because you already have feelings for someone," Allura explained. Her voice was patient, but her mouth moved in a way that was a little stiffer than natural, already slightly irritated.

"I don't," Keith insisted, to an outburst of Lance's snorting laughter behind him.

"No, no, I want to hear exactly how not self aware he is," Lance said, like Keith wasn't standing right there in earshot. He turned around and his demeanor changed instantly. "Sooooo, Keith… what _is_ your type?"

Sure, Keith had used that word earlier, but he barely knew what it meant. Was it a physical thing? A personality thing? How strong of a preference was it supposed to be? "Not you, if that's what you're asking," he said, to deflect.

Lance sputtered again; it really was too easy to wind him up. "You would be _lucky_ if I was. But no, I'm just—"

"Asking for a friend?"

"Yes, exactly. That's exactly why I'm asking."

"Yeah, right."

Lance's hands twitched into fists and his nostrils flared as he took a deep breath. Keith looked away, pretending he hadn't noticed.

Hunk sighed. "Keith, seriously here. You never talk about this, but do you like anyone? Like, _like_ -like?"

"Not... really?"

"Have you _ever_ crushed on anyone?"

"Yeah. Probably." Wracking his brain for a name, he found he couldn't actually think of anyone. "Maybe. I— I don't know?" There were people he found attractive, aesthetically, but that wasn't the same thing as a crush. Or was it? He was pretty sure it wasn't the same. "What's it like?"

"Oh man. What's it like to crush on someone?" Hunk drummed his fingers against his chin. "You constantly feel like you're gonna throw up, but like in a good way."

Keith's nose wrinkled. "How is that good?"

He didn't get sick often, but when he did it was _miserable._ The only good thing about puking was that he sometimes felt slightly less like steaming trash afterwards. It had to suck to be Hunk, who regularly got so acutely anxious that he made himself sick. Maybe he measured all of his emotions against nausea.

"No, no, not like—" Hunk mimed vomiting violently, adding in some sound effects for good measure. Keith backed away, bumping into Shiro, who stepped out of reach again. Keith's heart sank. "It's like butterflies."

Keith thought of butterflies, their spindly legs and antennae and scaled wings. "In your stomach?" That was even _more_ disgusting.

"Yeah, see, you get it!"

Keith shook his head decisively. He'd literally never thought about butterflies in his digestive system before. "Nope. Don't get it."

"He means fluttery," Lance said, wiggling his fingers in a way that probably made sense in his own context. Keith couldn't read his mind, though, so it was just confusing. "Your heart's pounding, or it _aches,_ but you also feel really light, like you could walk on air—"

"And then you get all sweaty," Hunk added.

"Kind of dizzy, sometimes? Lightheaded, like you can't get enough air. You've never felt like that?"

Keith mentally tallied those symptoms. "I've never had a heart attack, no."

"I'm starting to doubt that you have a heart," Lance muttered.

"Lance." Shiro managed to inject a warning into a single word and the angle of his brows, and Lance backed down. It would never stop being impressive that when Shiro spoke, people listened. 

"Fine. Are we all doing this?" Lance muttered, the mutiny in his voice kept to a minimum. He glanced back at Keith, at Shiro, and back to Keith again. "When you've got their eyes on you, it feels like you're on the top of the world. A crush, I mean. You want to hold onto that. You want to impress them, so they won't look away."

That was a nope, too. Keith didn't care about impressing anyone. Or maybe, if he delved deeper into his psyche, he wanted to impress everyone. To prove wrong every person who'd ever underestimated him or written him off as worthless. But he knew how futile that dream was; other people's opinions were far from his control.

Shiro never required any convincing — he was the first person Keith wanted to look his way, back when they first met. When Keith was just a scared kid. After Shiro peeled back the first few layers, Keith turned terrified that his kind attention would be snatched away, as with everyone else. By now, he knew that fear was irrational. That didn't stop it from churning in his stomach at the slightest provocation, though. 

So he shook his head to that point, too. It wasn't the same. 

Pidge was the next to offer her opinion. "You make each other laugh," she said simply, and Keith knew his rebuttal right away.

"You all make me laugh."

Pidge rolled her eyes. "And there's _no one_ who stands out to you?"

Well, he spent the most time with Shiro, so that didn't count. Keith hadn't taken a math class since he was eleven, but he was pretty sure that was how statistics worked. "Nope."

"You have a deep mutual respect for each other," Allura offered. "And even on the worst of days, their presence makes your life a little brighter."

And that made sense, coming from Allura. People so often saw only what they wanted in her, and though she handled it with grace, he knew it weighed on her mind. He knew that affected Shiro, too. 

"I mean, that's all of you again." For the most part, Keith felt that his friends saw him as he was.

Hunk took him by the shoulders, looking down at him in a painfully earnest way. "Keith. My dude. A friend-crush is different from a crush-crush."

He just said the same word twice. He'd done it earlier, too. Like-like, crush-crush. Keith stared right back, searching Hunk's face for clues. "Are you just making this up?" He looked around at the others. "You're all my friends. What's the difference?"

"Are you serious right now?" Matt threw his head back as if looking to the heavens; in the dark, dank dungeon, the effect wasn't the same. "I can't dignify this with a response," he said. Despite that, he kept talking. "Are you seriously trying to say you feel exactly the same for all of us?"

_"No._ It's just— this is stupid. I'm not in love with anyone. Isn't that a good thing?"

"This is science, Keith." Candlelight glinted off Pidge's glasses in a way that was almost sinister. "We have to isolate all the variables."

"Fine." Keith crossed his arms. "Let's get this over with." He looked to Shiro next. He was the only one who hadn't spoken, and the one whose opinion Keith trusted the most.

Shiro took a deep breath. "A crush is someone who's always on your mind. When you're apart, you want to be together. When you're together, it doesn't matter what you're doing. Everything feels right."

Keith's pulse pounded in his throat, and suddenly he was acutely aware of every breath he took. Who did Shiro want to spend all of his time with? Shiro was his best friend, yet Keith had no idea. He wracked his brain, sifting through every memory looking for times Shiro seemed dissatisfied by Keith's presence. Times Shiro might've wished someone else was there in Keith's place. How had he not noticed?

"Oh." Matt snapped his fingers. "I thought of one. You're jealous when someone else is getting their attention."

"Oh, _good one."_ Lance tried to high-five him, but missed. On the second try, they connected.

"I don't get jealous," Keith said, trying to ignore how deeply the realization unsettled him. "Jealousy is pointless."

Lance rolled his eyes. "Riiiight. So I guess you were pissy for all of third year for no reason, and it had nothing to do with Shiro dating—"

"Jealousy is _pointless,"_ Keith repeated. "There's nothing you can do to change someone else's feelings. If they don't want you, that's it. There's nothing you can do about it and no point in getting upset."

"Alright, then. For science," Matt said, shooting a look at the two of them. "Do you think Shiro's attractive?"

Shiro protested— "You don't have to answer that, Keith—"

But the answer was obvious, wasn't it? "I have eyes, of course I do."

And then every eye in the room was on him, from Allura's softly pitying gaze to Lance's jaw-dropping indignation, to whatever Shiro was directing his way. Keith had never before seen that particular shade of confusion. It was something hesitant, vulnerable. 

"Wow. Wooooow." Hunk shook his head. "I can't tell if that's astoundingly self-aware or totally not."

Keith's voice rose in spiraling panic. "What? Doesn't everyone?" He felt like he was losing his mind. Had he said something wrong? Shiro looked good, right?

Pidge ignored him. "I vote not," she answered Hunk.

"Keith," Shiro said in the cautious tone he used for skittish eleven-year-old Keith, or for frustrated current-Keith. "I know the potion is affecting you, and I don't want you to say anything you don't mean."

But there was nothing wrong with him. "No, I mean it. I know what I'm _saying."_ It came out a little forcefully, but Shiro needed to _understand._ "You're really handsome. I've thought it before." Handsome didn't cover all of it, but how could he sum Shiro up in one word? "I like looking at you. It's just… it's _you._ You figure out the smart way to do stupid things, and you have a terrible sense of humor, and you give cards to your _cat_ and I…" With every word, Shiro looked sadder and sadder. Keith was saying it all wrong and making things worse, and he just needed to stop talking. "I think you'd be a really good boyfriend." That was a weird thing to say, wasn't it? "Bro," he added, to make it less weird.

"This is so sad," Lance whispered, loud enough to be clearly audible.

"I mean, he's _almost_ there. There's like two dots that need to be connected—"

"Nah, way more than that."

Keith bristled, defenses raising again and about to snap back, but reined himself in when Allura lightly touched his arm.

"Why don't we start somewhere else?" she suggested. She even waited for his lukewarm nod before she continued. "Say you were dating someone. How would you act around them?"

That was a really stupid question. Keith expected better from Allura. "Why would I be any different? Aren't they supposed to like me for who I am?"

"That's right," Shiro said. His hand landed on Keith's shoulder for a fraction of a second — not long enough for Keith to enjoy the touch before it was snatched away as if burned. Shiro crossed his arms tightly against his chest. "You don't need to change anything about yourself, Keith. You're perfect the way you are, and anyone who's worth your time will see that."

Allura nodded, looking at him expectantly, but whatever she thought she was connecting wasn't working. "I agree," she said. "Someone loves you exactly as you are."

"So what would be different if you were dating someone?" Pidge asked. She'd hopped up to sit on top of a desk at some point, swinging her legs through the air. "You don't like it when people touch you, right? Would _that_ be different?"

"I guess so."

"You don't sound certain about that. What do you want out of a relationship? There is no right answer," Allura said.

What did anyone want out of a relationship? Marriage was for life, theoretically, but most of the married couples Keith knew couldn't stand each other. So, what, they wanted to have kids? That couldn't be the only reason. Keith had only ever seen one marriage that didn't seem like a living hell: the Holts. He had no memory of his own parents together, and he'd rather spend the rest of his life alone than emulate any of his foster parents. He _certainly_ didn't want children — no point in fucking up yet another life because of his incompetence.

And he didn't really understand the purpose of dating, if not to find someone you could stand to spend the rest of your life with. There was the physicality of it, but that alone didn't interest him; kissing honestly sounded kinda gross. Plus, he wasn't under the illusion that anyone would want him for a lifetime. Real life didn't have happy endings like books and movies, and he was tired of watching people leave him. It hurt enough to have friends who'd someday realize he wasn't worth the effort. Why would he want to add another dimension to that?

"I don't know. Someone who can tolerate me long term."

"Dude, that's just… Dude. Do you want a hug? I think you need a hug. Hell, _I_ need a hug now." Hunk sniffled, and was that a hint of a tear in his eye? "You deserve way more than that, man." He wrapped Keith in one of his all-encompassing hugs and squeezed until his ribs creaked. Keith squirmed like a disgruntled cat. "I can't in good conscience continue this bet," Hunk said over his head.

Pidge had no such sympathy. "So you forfeit? Pay up."

"It doesn't even count anymore, we've already violated the Prime Directive," Hunk argued.

"And has he figured it out yet? No."

Keith couldn't decide what to ask about: what they'd been betting about or what, exactly, Stargate had to do with the situation.

But Allura patted his hand, not unkindly, and pressed on with her point. "So… you want commitment along with an emotional connection. You want to feel secure in that, otherwise you're not interested in anything further."

Keith shrugged. That would imply he was interested in anything, but it was close enough. "I guess."

"I mean, you and Shiro definitely have an emotional _something_ going on," Lance said smugly, as if he'd won something. "And you let him touch you. Just saying."

"Shiro's different. We've been close for a long time." He looked at Shiro. "You're like a brother to me."

Hunk winced. "That's rough, buddy," he said, clapping Shiro on the back.

"It's fine," Shiro said. "I knew that, and there's nothing wrong with Keith feeling however he feels—"

"Keith," Pidge interrupted. "If Matt and I acted the way you do with Shiro, it would be _really fucking weird."_

"—and he likes someone else, and that's _fine,"_ Shiro finished.

What were either of them talking about? How did he act with Shiro, and who the hell did he supposedly like? "No, I don't," he told Shiro.

Shiro sighed. "That's just the love potion talking. You told me earlier."

No? He hadn't? "Who do you think I like?"

"I don't know. You wouldn't say."

So why did Shiro think he liked someone, and why did he look _sad_ about it?

Allura pulled them back to whatever point she was trying to make. "I know it's difficult for you to get close to people. But I like to think that the rest of us are important to you, too."

"Yeah. You're all like family to me."

"But even then, Shiro's different?"

Keith nodded, slowly.

_"How_ is he different?"

"It doesn't matter, why are we still talking about this?" Keith crossed his arms across his chest. "The love potion didn't work on me, so everything's fine. Let's just focus on figuring out who did this." 

"But _why_ didn't the love potion work on you?"

"Or why does it _look like_ the love potion didn't work on you?"

Keith shrugged tightly. "You guys are the ones interested in theory. You can speculate all you want, but I'm done. I have shit to do."

"You seriously don't get it? You're _seriously_ not picking up on what we're all putting down here?" Lance stomped back to the table. "Shiro. Feed me one of those," he said, jabbing at a strawberry.

“Why?" Shiro asked. It wasn't a no. 

"I'm gonna prove the potion _is_ working, and this guy is just an idiot," Lance said, cutting a glare in Keith's direction. "It's less than a day, and you won't let me do anything, right?"

"What? No." Goosebumps prickled up Keith's arms, and he batted Lance away from the strawberries.

"If this gets your head out of your ass, it's worth it."

"Why don't you want this to happen?" Pidge asked.

"Why do _you_ want it to happen? It's pointless."

"Not pointless. If Lance gets all lovey towards Shiro, then we'll know it's working and you can reevaluate your life and your choices."

"Nothing is gonna happen."

"Then what's the harm?"

The words wouldn't leave Keith's mouth. It was stupid and he didn't know why, but he couldn't stand to see Shiro's hands anywhere near Lance's mouth. There was no harm, except that Shiro might accidentally brush against Lance's lips, as he had with Keith, and that was intolerable.

Matt raised his hand. "I vote yes. Put us all out of our misery."

"So it's settled. Shiro." Lance hopped up on the desk and, with melodrama that belonged in a daytime soap, leaned back into Shiro's space. "You ready?"

Keith waited for Shiro to laugh and shove Lance away, but he didn't. He looked far too serious, and met Keith's eyes with slow intensity. What did he see there? 

He reached for a strawberry.

"Shiro—" Keith grabbed at his wrist. "Don't do this. Please."

But Shiro shook him off. "Keith, I need to know. If there's any chance of this affecting you, I shouldn't be around you until it wears off. If nothing happens, it'll be a load off my mind."

Keith pulled away, taking half a step back. Ouch. If he was interested in Shiro, like, romantically, that would've hurt. As it stood, it left him sore in the hollow of his chest. He knew he wasn't a catch, but he wasn't disgusting, was he? 

He turned away — he couldn't stand to say it again, couldn't stand to see it. _Please don’t. Don't do it—_

"It'll be alright," Allura said to him softly, and he looked up just in time to see Lance's mouth close around a strawberry Shiro held aloft.

Lance's eyes widened. "You get the good stuff, man," he said through a full mouth. His eyes shut with a contented hum as he chewed, and he was standing way too close to Shiro.

Keith didn't like it at all, but he couldn't leave, either. What if something _was_ wrong? What if Shiro needed him?

When Lance opened his eyes again, he fluttered his eyelashes totally unnecessarily as he gazed up at Shiro. There was something soulful about the way he looked at Shiro, unlike the way he flirted with whichever girl caught his attention in the moment. Something more genuine.

"Cut the crap, Lance," Keith said, trying to break the moment. It didn't make a dent in Lance's fixation.

"Wow," he whispered breathlessly, devoid of cheesy lines and dramatic declarations. Then, he reached out to cup Shiro's face in his hands and leaned in for a kiss, and that was so much worse.

Shiro just barely managed to get his hand in the way, so Lance ended up with lips against fingers. He looked like he might try again, but Keith wouldn't give him the chance. He hauled Lance away by the collar and planted himself between the two of them.

"Not jealous, huh?" 

* * *

"Hey. Hey, Shiro." When Lance had his attention, he grinned in a way he probably thought was roguishly attractive. "If I had to rate you 1-10, you'd be a nine—" he winked and made finger guns— "because _I'm_ the one you need."

Instead of sitting squished next to Shiro as he usually did during meals, Keith was stuck next to _that_ disaster. Shiro, refusing to be within arm's reach, was across the table, so Keith got to see the full range of exasperation that fell across his face.

"Hey," Keith said, offended. "Shiro's a ten in _every_ way."

That didn't appear to help. Shiro scrubbed a hand down his face and sighed. "Keith, I'd appreciate if you'd stop."

Keith recoiled, hurt. How was he the problem? Lance was the one hitting on him in a vaguely condescending way, Keith was just trying to defend the truth. Shiro was amazing all on his own, and he certainly didn't need someone like _Lance_ to be complete.

Smirking, Pidge tossed a chunk of bread crust at Lance to get his attention. "So, you admit you're a one?"

"Not _a_ one, _the_ one," Lance protested, catapulting a pea back.

Keith moodily stirred his soup. Shiro was done with him. He'd given up, the way he promised he never would. Lance could say whatever the hell he wanted, but the moment Keith tried to say something nice about Shiro, he was told to stop. How did that make sense? It didn't. Shiro was his best friend, of course he'd want to say nice things about him.

But maybe… maybe Shiro didn't think they were that close. Maybe Keith had been reading too much into their friendship for the past four years and change. Keith briefly considered flopping face-first into his soup, but decided he wasn't actually that dramatic. He would suffer in silence instead.

He was determinedly crushing chunks of carrot against the inside of his bowl, too queasy to eat but too afraid to look up, when Shiro flinched and bashed his knee against the underside of the table. Every soup bowl and water goblet down the line rippled, and every face turned to look at them. Shiro jerked again, cursing under his breath, and Hunk hopped up.

"Nope, no footsie. Let Shiro eat in peace," he said, herding Lance further down the bench and sitting down in his vacated spot. Keith glanced down; he was bodily blocking Lance's legs under the table. "Got you covered, man."

Lance flailed trying to get around him, but Hunk wasn't the best Keeper in Hogwarts for nothing. Shiro managed to get a few bites in — Keith watched from the corner of his eye, hesitant to make eye contact. The tension in his shoulders eased minutely when Lance gave up his struggling, but ratcheted back up when he spoke.

"Hey. Hey, Shiro."

Shiro took a deliberate sip of soup and stared directly at the opposite wall.

"Shiro. Have you ever been to space?"

He frowned, but didn't move his eyes, didn't speak. Keith remembered how relaxed he'd been just a couple of hours earlier, curled up in bed with his cat, surrounded by flowers.

Matt facepalmed. "I know where this is going."

Keith didn't, but he knew it would be bad.

"I bet he has," Lance stage-whispered, conspiratorially. "Because his ass is out of this world."

Well, Lance wasn't _wrong,_ but it wasn't the time or place. Shiro shut his eyes and exhaled slowly through his nose. He was already stressed before all of this started happening, and now… Keith just wished he could give him a hug, or rub the tension from his shoulders, or brush his hair. Or just a hand on his arm. Just to let him know he wasn't alone, that he was seen.

Keith's arms weren't long enough to reach all the way across the table. Instead, he cautiously stretched a leg out and bumped their feet together. No reaction. Shiro was a little annoyed with Lance, sure. Everyone got a little annoyed with Lance at some point. But Keith's attempts to comfort were always welcomed. He hooked his foot around Shiro's ankle, unsure how to make it into a comforting gesture. Should he have slipped his shoe off? Or was that weirder?

He had no time to ponder it before Shiro's expression plummeted again. _"Lance—"_

"How long do you think my legs are?? I'm not Keithy Longlegs. Who—" Lance's eyes widened, then narrowed as they landed on Keith. "Keith!"

Shiro glanced under the table. "Keith?" The irritation fell from his tone, and Keith was left wondering how the hell he put that look on Shiro's face, and how could he take it back? He just wanted to help. He just wanted Shiro to feel better. "Keith, was that you?"

Under the weight of every eye this side of the table, Keith panicked. "No," he said, a little too quickly, even though his leg was still touching Shiro's.

It only disappointed him more.

"What the hell, Keith? I thought you were my friend," Lance hissed. "You know I like Shiro."

"Yeah, for like an hour," Keith snapped back. "Give it up. He doesn't like you like that."

"Being a dick to me isn't gonna make him like you any better, either. Can't you let me do anything without stealing my thunder?"

Keith was about to retort that there was no thunder to steal, but Shiro derailed him by standing from the table. "Look… It's better if I just go upstairs. I thought I could keep this under control but I see that was a mistake."

No. Shiro couldn't leave. Keith stood up to follow, but Shiro froze him with a look. "Don't," he said, striding away.

Keith collapsed back into his seat. Shiro didn't want to be around him. Shiro didn’t even want to see him. 

It was a simple fact of Keith's life: people left. Sometimes it was his fault, sometimes it wasn't, sometimes there was no reason at all. It sucked, but it was useless to kick up a fuss or demand answers. He wasn't a kid anymore; he knew that once someone decided to leave, there was no point in begging them to stay.

But Shiro was supposed to be _different._ Shiro made promises — Keith even believed some of them — but he wasn't a paragon of honesty, Keith realized. His lies were kindly meant, mostly for the sake of sparing others' feelings, but they were still lies. An aching weight settled into Keith's stomach, and he wanted to curl into himself and hide away. How long would Shiro lie to ease the loneliness of a boy who had no friends, no family?

Were these the butterflies Hunk thought he should feel? There was nothing fluttery in Keith’s stomach, but he felt like he was thirty seconds from vomiting. Keith hoped against hope, but it was useless — their friendship was so fragile that the mere possibility of Keith’s interest was disgusting enough to drive Shiro away. 

Keith stared down at his plate, idly pushing a chunk of potato around before dropping his fork, too. He wasn't hungry anymore.

"Hey, man." Hunk ducked into Keith's line of sight. He wasn't the person Keith most wanted to see right now, but his gentle presence was still a comfort. "Take a few minutes to cool down, but you need to talk to Shiro."

"He doesn't want to see me," Keith said without lifting his head. He wasn't a sulky child — he _wasn't._

"He doesn't want to _hurt_ you. If he knew you were this upset, he wouldn't be okay with it."

"I'm not upset," Keith insisted. "I'll respect what he wants. It's fine."

"Alright. You can think that if you want," Hunk said, assembling a plate of Shiro's favorites. "You're wrong, but you can think whatever you want."

"Have you _seen_ him after quidditch practice?" Lance's voice rang out. "When he's all flushed and his eyes are bright—"

Hunk rolled his eyes. "You haven't talked to him, like, with words. Sometimes you need those. Even the two of you. You can't rely on dramatic eye contact and significant shoulder touches forever."

"And the tone with which they say each other’s names," Allura added, apparently not as engrossed in Lance and Pidge's antics as he thought. "I've noticed they can communicate a lot to each other in just one word's inflection."

"Okay, thank you. I'm not crazy," Hunk said, putting a hand out for a high-five. Allura returned it delicately. "I noticed that, too, but _someone—"_ he shot a look at Lance— "said I was making it up."

"Definitely not," she said archly.

"Talk to him. No excitement or distractions." Hunk waved his hands down the table. Veronica had joined them at some point, and casually had Lance in a headlock. Keith saw at least three ways he could’ve gotten out, but Lance was flailing and protesting instead. "Be honest. Respect boundaries. All that good stuff."

"Do not be afraid of change, Keith," Allura said with a bittersweet smile. "No one can be the same their entire life. It's how we grow."

"But things are good now and he's already—" Keith stopped. He couldn't get words past the sudden thickness in his throat. "He's done so much for me." His life would be a lot different without Shiro in it — so much that it hurt to imagine.

"There's no limit on how much one person can love," she said. "You all have shown me that, every day. You're not draining him. Let him tell you this himself."

"Alright?" Hunk asked, looking between the two of them. Keith nodded minutely and Hunk put the plate in his hands. "Alright. Get going."

Right. Keith could do this. He just had to walk through the Great Hall, up to Gryffindor Tower, up seven flights of stairs to Shiro's dorm, and then… His stomach coiled, and he took a deep breath to calm his nerves. Patience. _Then_ he would talk to Shiro.

"It's like watching a baby bird leave the nest," he heard Hunk whisper.

"You raised him well," Allura said, with solemn humor.

Keith didn't meet anyone on his way upstairs — or maybe he did, and they dodged away from his gloomy intensity. He was too caught up in the whirlpool of dread that swirled all the way down from his brain to his gut. This wasn't going to end with Keith getting everything he wanted. It never did, so he rarely let himself want. Shiro was too good to be true. He'd always known it. And now Keith had driven him away, as he always did.

It was inevitable, yet Keith's feet kept climbing the stairs. If there was even a tiny chance… wasn't Shiro worth it? Worth anything Keith could give?

So many people had left, but Keith would still beg for Shiro to stay. He paused in front of Shiro's door and took a deep breath. That realization ate at him; he'd always thought of himself as more self-reliant than that, but Shiro was different. He hadn't torn down Keith's walls — he knocked every day, giving smiles and kind words until Keith lowered the gate. And then he _stayed._ Keith grew used to him there, in his heart, and didn't like to imagine how it would feel to be empty again. 

Keith knocked on Shiro's door; his heart pounded just as loudly against the wall of his ribs. Just this afternoon, he would've walked right in. Now, maybe Shiro wouldn't want to see him.

Or maybe he would. Hunk was implying _something._ Keith didn't like to dwell on the intangible, didn't like to hope—

And this was why. Shiro opened the door, and his face fell. "Keith, you shouldn't have come—"

So much for whatever Hunk and Allura were trying to say. "I brought food," Keith cut in. He didn't want to hear any more of that. Once upon a time, Shiro was the only person who would never say Keith didn't belong. "I promise there's no love potion in any of it."

Shiro's lips twitched. On another day, it might've been a smile. "Wasn't worried about that," Shiro said, accepting the plate. "I know you'd never." He left Keith at the threshold while he went to set it down at his desk.

Keith slumped against the doorframe. Shiro hadn't opened the door any wider; it wasn't an invitation to come in. Keith's hope for reassurance withered away by the second, yet he couldn't help but be mesmerized by Shiro, the way he moved.

But Shiro hadn’t closed the door, hadn’t shut Keith out yet. He returned, studying Keith with the same intensity. Keith felt his gaze almost like a physical thing, sweeping over him until their eyes met again. Long moments passed without a single word; Keith's words had fled and he didn't know how to find them. Did it matter? Shiro was looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen before, something Keith didn't know how to read.

Words. They needed words, Hunk had said, but at that moment Keith would be lucky if he could string three together. His mouth opened and closed without a sound. He licked his lips and got ready to try again.

Shiro beat him to it. "Keith," he said. His name was colored with _some_ kind of tone, as Allura had said. He was disappointed, maybe? Disappointed in Keith? "We'll talk in the morning. You shouldn't be here right now."

Disappointed.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Keith insisted, then snapped his mouth shut. He hated the feeling that began to overwhelm him, that filled him so completely it might burst from his chest. He was acting like a child, wasn't he? Protesting that the world wasn't fair, as if his wants mattered in the grand scheme of things. They didn't. No part of him was anywhere near as important as Shiro. "I'll leave you alone," he amended, subdued, and turned to slink away.

He heard the door creak, and then Shiro grabbed him by the hand, pulling him to a stop. Keith's heart pounded so that he could feel the pulse through every part of his body, against Shiro's long fingers wrapped all the way around Keith's wrist. He glanced down and couldn't tear his eyes away, not until Shiro spoke again.

"You didn't do anything wrong," Shiro agreed. Shiro agreed? A stupid, desperate hope leapt in Keith's chest. "But you're not yourself right now, Keith."

"Am I acting different?"

"Not much," Shiro admitted. His hand fell away from Keith's; instinctually, Keith turned his hand to slide their palms together, almost catching hold of him again. "But I don't want any chance of you doing something you'll regret in the morning."

"Nothing's happening. I'm the same."

"I know you believe that right now." Shiro ran a hand through his hair, leaving it half-fluffed and messy. He stepped back into the room and started to close the door. "We'll talk tomorrow. I promise."

_No._ Keith panicked. "Please, can I hug you?"

He regretted it immediately as Shiro froze. This wasn't what Keith wanted. After a moment of indecision, the reserve in Shiro's face softened and he pushed the door open again. It was all the permission Keith needed; as soon as there was enough room to squeeze through, he surged forward to cling to Shiro's chest. Relieved, he felt Shiro's arms close around him. It was almost enough — Keith crowded in closer and pressed his face into Shiro's shoulder, letting out a pent-up breath as he relaxed. It was Shiro, warm and steady,

Another deep breath filled his lungs. Shiro, who smelled so good that he felt his eyelids drooping and a pleasant tingling along his scalp—

Oh. Oh _shit_. Keith's eyes popped open again. The Amortentia, the reason it smelled so familiar— Shiro's shampoo, Shiro's sweat, the brisk fresh air as they flew together, the sense memories of evenings spent cozily side by side. The calm security only Shiro could give him and the rush in his veins every time Shiro smiled.

What the _fuck._

"What's wrong?" Shiro asked. His low voice would usually infuse him with a bone-deep calm, but Keith was busy panicking like a prey animal. "You just got really tense."

Keith didn't have an answer to give. He drew closer again, but their bodies didn't fit together the same as they had moments before. It didn’t make sense, but the burgeoning realization emerging from its cocoon felt truthful. Shiro was the most precious thing in the world, and Keith was greedy for him. He turned his head, lifted his face up. They were standing so close that his nose bumped against Shiro's jaw — Shiro's mouth was _so close_ and Keith's tiny little lizard brain was skittering around on shifting sand, putting together the pieces. Puzzling out why this was significant.

He stared at Shiro's lips. They were pretty, like every part of him. This wasn't a revelation, so why did it feel different? Because Shiro was holding him and looking at him with soft eyes? Because his lips were in kissing distance?

Whatever Keith felt… Could Shiro possibly feel the same?

"You smell good," Keith answered faintly. It felt like Shiro had asked some question ages ago. He didn't know if his answer made sense, but it was the only thing he knew for certain. He'd never before thought about Shiro's mouth in proximity to his own, and he didn't know how to feel about it. 

"Okay," Shiro sighed, gently starting to untangle Keith's arms from around him. "That's enough."

_No._ Keith dug his fingers in, like Black did with her claws when she was using him as a pillow and wasn't ready to get up. Shiro smelled like a love potion that was supposed to reveal the things he found most attractive in the world. Apparently what Keith found most attractive, deep in the unearthed levels of his psyche, was his extremely platonic best friend.

_"You're like a brother to me,"_ he remembered saying earlier, with painful clarity.

"Do you remember how I was when we met?" he asked, desperate for Shiro to understand. "I didn't love anyone then. I think I forgot how." The words weren't coming out right. "But I know now."

"Keith." Shiro shut his eyes. "Not now. Go back to your room." His voice was pitched gentle but firm, leaving no room for argument. It was the same voice he used every single time someone handed him a card that day. "We can't be around each other right now, but we'll talk in the morning."

Keith drew a shaky breath. So this was just one more way he wanted Shiro, one more thing he didn't deserve to have.

This was Shiro's answer. There was no way to argue with that. "Okay." Keith turned to retreat down the hall.

A word from Shiro stopped him. "You are so, so important to me. That's not gonna change because of some potion. I told you once— I'll never give up on you. I'll be here in the morning."

Keith nodded, not looking back until after the door clicked shut. 

  
  


* * *

"So," Kinkade said. From the rustling, Keith thought he must be unpacking his bag from the day. "What's going on?"

"Blackmail," Pidge said.

At the same time, Leifsdottir chimed, "Research on human psychology, as related to induced infatuations."

Keith pressed his face deeper into his pillow. It smelled like Shiro, too — last week, he'd twisted his ankle in Quidditch practice and didn't want to go all the way to the hospital wing for a bit of soreness. Keith brought all his pillows upstairs that night, conjured up some ice, and made sure Shiro kept his foot elevated. It was just a bit of practicality; sometimes, wizards didn't know the simplest of muggle remedies. It didn't mean anything that Keith had fallen asleep up there. It'd happened dozens of times before.

Every memory was playing through Keith's brain, a highlight reel of his own blunders that was making him physically cringe. He curled tighter around his pillow and stifled a scream.

"Right," Pidge agreed. "That too."

Someone poked Keith in the shoulder, and he reluctantly raised his head.

"You're not trying to smother yourself, are you?" Romelle asked.

"Only a little," Keith grumbled. He shuffled over to make room for her to sit.

All of the fifth-year Gryffindors were stuffed into the one room — Hunk was once again proving his reputation as the best Keeper in the school, rebuffing every one of Lance's attempts to sneak out of their room and up the stairs. Leifsdottir, perched on top of Lance's desk with a scroll and quill hovering at the ready for note-taking, peered at him with a tilted head. Rizavi brought snacks, and Pidge had started negotiating loudly with Kinkade.

"I brother-zoned myself," Keith whispered. Romelle, sitting cross-legged next to him on the bed, patted his head and made sympathetic noises.

"For _research_ purposes," Pidge was saying, "can you document everything this dumbass does?"

"I could," Kinkade said, watching Hunk try to distract Lance using the stack of Valentine's cards he'd been so proud of earlier in the day. Lance flicked each one away if Hunk brought them within range. 

"I'll pay you back for the film _and_ do your transfiguration homework for the next two weeks," Pidge offered.

"Done," Kinkade agreed, shaking her hand.

Rizavi threw an every-flavor-bean at the side of his head. "Where'd you learn to negotiate? You're the best in the castle, you could've gotten _at least_ four weeks."

"I've got it," said Lance, the light of a terrible idea dawning across his face. He fanned the cards out. "I'll write him a letter. A poem. A _song."_

"Is that wise?" Romelle asked, wrinkling her nose, but Lance was too caught up in his own brilliance to hear her.

"I'll serenade him!" he exclaimed.

Keith snorted. "There are werewolves in the forest that sing better than you."

"Rude," Lance sniffed, before ransacking his desk for spare parchment.

"Do I want to know who he's obsessed with this week?" Griffin asked with a disgruntled frown. 

It wasn't a completely unfair comment to make. Keith poked at Lance's fleeting crushes, too, but he didn’t like the tone Griffin just used.

Leifsdottir answered with her usual precision. "Due to the influence of approximately 0.56 milliliters of B. Kaltenecker's love potion, from the ninth edition of his collected recipes, Shiro."

"Are you serious?" Griffin asked, with a judgmental tilt to his stupid eyebrows. _"Shirogane_ love potioned him?"

Keith knew what he was trying to imply, and he didn't like it. "It wasn't like that," he got out through gritted teeth. "It was for science."

"Whatever makes you feel better," Griffin said, stretching his shoulders. He was still watching Keith from the corner of his eye. "Of course you would have a problem with it."

"The potion appears to have been intended for Shiro, as it was found in candy he received as a gift today," Leifsdottir explained.

Griffin shrugged again. "If you figure out who it was, tell a teacher. I don't want to lose any more house points because you beat someone up."

Griffin knew full well that he hadn't gotten in a fight since third year. It had been a bad one, and Keith spent the years since atoning. Shiro had only just managed to keep Keith from getting kicked off the quidditch team — though he'd been shoved from Chaser to Beater, just about the only position remaining to him. Something about his teamwork ability, but Griffin was allowed to keep his position despite having an equal hand in the fight. Of course.

Keith bit his tongue to keep from snapping back. It had been a good change, in the end. There was something especially cathartic about protecting his team by zipping around at high speeds and whacking things with a bat. After working out some steam, he'd finally learned that Shiro had a point about patience; beating Griffin on what he considered his own turf was way more satisfying than putting a fist in his face.

"Uh, Keith, you didn't need that for anything, did you?" Hunk asked, wringing his hands.

It took a couple seconds for Keith to realize Lance had gotten into his desk and was scribbling on something with his chicken-scratch handwriting.

"Oh, whoops," Lance said, holding up a small white envelope Keith had intentionally left underneath one of his textbooks when he left the room that morning. "Sorry, dude. I mean, it's not as important as my undying love for Shiro, but still—"

"Is that what I think it is?" Rizavi's bag of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans fell to the floor as she dove for the envelope. "You didn't say anything—"

"That's _Keith's—"_ Griffin protested, unexpectedly.

"Aw, Keith, you don't mind if I look at this, right?"

Keith had just noticed Lance starting to write again, this time on the back of the transfiguration essay Keith had finished this morning. "Don't care," he said, wrestling the quill out of Lance's hand.

He missed the specifics of what happened next, distracted by vanishing the large ink spill resulting from the tussle, though he suspected Griffin said something tetchy. Either way, Rizavi seemed delighted.

"Oooh, it's an invitation to meet up in the Astronomy Tower. Tonight. _Unsigned."_ She bounced in her seat, grinning at him. "You gonna go meet your mystery lover?"

"No," Keith said, debating whether or not he could turn in the essay as-is, with Lance's terrible verses on the back. It was a pain to get the ink out once it dried.

"You sure?" Rizavi cajoled. "It's a really romantic spot."

Not _that_ romantic. Keith went up there all the time with Shiro, and Shiro didn't feel anything like that for him. He vanished enough of the letters to make the writing illegible, ignored Lance's squawking about the destruction of his masterpiece, and re-rolled the scroll. It was no wonder Shiro didn't see him in that way — what could Keith possibly offer? He wasn't likeable or good with words. If he tried to write something for Shiro, it'd be even worse than Lance's attempts. Just humiliating.

Griffin frowned. "You're not even curious?"

Keith stuffed his essay into a drawer and locked it. _"No_ ," he said, flopping back on his bed. 

"Okay, no. You don't get to be that dramatic, emo boy," Lance snapped, yanking at the drawer handle, to no avail. "You're choosing to be alone, but you're giving me shit for my feelings and you won't even let me see Shiro. Just because you're miserable doesn't mean we all have to be. _Especially_ Shiro. Don't you think he's lonely?"

"What the hell kind of question is that?" Keith grumbled, but his defenses started to crumble under the sinking realization that Lance was right. He _was_ being selfish. When it came to Shiro, he always was. "When is he alone?"

Kinkade exhaled sharply in a way that was almost a laugh. "When is anyone alone in this castle?" he mumbled.

"He hasn't gone on a single date in, like, a year," Lance said.

"A year isn't _that_ long," Keith protested. Lance hadn't been on a date in like sixteen years, as far as Keith knew, but he didn't see anyone getting up in arms about _that._

Rizavi looked thoughtful. "Plus he's got his mysterious unrequited crush."

Which Keith hadn't known about. At all.

_"Unrequited,"_ Pidge snorted.

Hunk looked up at the ceiling. "Right. Mysterious. We have absolutely no idea who Shiro likes. No way of knowing whatsoever."

"Well, yeah," said Rizavi. "He turned everyone down this year, which isn't really a surprise, but I overheard Acxa telling Veronica that Lotor's getting sick of Shiro _'bemoaning the dreadful state of his amorous affairs,'"_ she said, in a crude imitation of Lotor's tone. That was a Rizavi embellishment; Acxa would never have said it like that.

Lance perked up. "D'you think he likes me?" he asked.

"No," Keith said flatly.

"Yeah, sorry, buddy. You're out of luck there."

Rizavi sat up, eyes wide. "Wait, do you know who he likes?"

"You don't?" Griffin sniped back.

"I've gathered several theories," Leifsdottir said. With a flick of her wand, another tiny scroll rocketed out of her bag, then enlarged to full size and unrolled itself before her. "Each calculated with a probability of error less than two percent."

"And I'm at the top of that list." Lance climbed out of bed, waggling his eyebrows. "Why am I down here when Shiro's up there, all alone?"

"Nope." Keith hopped up from his bed and shoved Lance — he stepped backwards and toppled into the mattress. "You're gonna stay right here and leave him alone. I'll sit on you all night if I have to."

"Can you blame me?" Lance asked shamelessly. Then, with a dreamy sigh— "He'd be such a good cuddler. Those pecs and strong arms—"

Just thinking about it turned Keith's stomach inside out. Lance, entwined in Shiro's arms, head pillowed on his chest? Talking in that weird, low purr that he seemed to think was sexy? "He is, alright?" Keith snapped, trying to scrub the image from his mind with the memory of Shiro's scent, the feel of Shiro's firm chest against his cheek.

Lance's jaw dropped and he gasped longer than Keith thought it was physically possible to inhale. "When have you cuddled with Shiro?"

Pidge snorted. "What do you think he’s doing when he doesn't sleep here?"

"I don't know, something mysterious, violent, and extra?" Lance suggested. "Like sneaking out to the Forbidden Forest to fight werewolves and other creatures of the night?" He stopped to catch his breath. "Wait, how do _you_ know?"

"Matt."

Kinkade shrugged. "I figured you were just out flying or something. I mean, I get it. There are like three introverts in the entire House."

"What the hell. He's been disappearing at night since _first year,"_ Griffin said, pinning him down with a glare.

Back then, Keith actually was sneaking out to fly. Shiro was out in the air almost as often as he was, and on those nights Keith would hide in the shadows to watch. Though they were both breaking the same rules, he didn't trust Shiro yet — but his grace in the air was uniquely captivating. One night when Keith thought he was alone, Shiro finally caught him in flight. He wasn't in trouble. Shiro taught him the basics he didn't have time to learn in the first years' rushed flying lessons. His challenge — his unwavering support, his _faith_ — helped Keith get his shit together.

And, yeah. At some point that turned into late night study sessions where Keith fell asleep on Shiro's shoulder in front of the common room fire, or in Shiro's bed amongst a mess of books and scrolls and dozing cat. It didn't mean anything. It wasn't like Keith did it on purpose, and Shiro was considerate enough to not want to disturb him. Hell, he was probably even more exhausted.

It didn't mean anything, he told himself again. At least, it didn't mean anything to Shiro.

Hunk propped his chin up on his hands. "I didn't know you were actually sleeping with Shiro, that kinda makes this whole thing even sadder."

"It doesn't mean anything. Friends can cuddle," Keith insisted mulishly.

"I'm so glad you agree." Romelle collided with him before he had a chance to react; her arms wrapped around his waist and squeezed him like a rag doll. He made a noise like a mouse being stepped on, and felt heat flood to his cheeks. People weren't supposed to make those kinds of noises. "My brother and I used to snuggle up together on the weekends to watch cartoons. He doesn't like to anymore — he's growing up so fast while I'm away."

Leifsdottir's head tilted in the other direction, like a confused puppy. "Car… toons?"

"Muggle entertainment," Kinkade explained. "Like if a bunch of paintings got together to perform a play."

Judging by how much Rizavi's eyes widened, Keith knew she had a terrible idea in mind. "Sir Cadogan would love to do that," she said, giving Keith a sudden, horrifying vision of the annoying little knight rapping à la Alexander Hamilton.

"I so hope he's accepted here, when he's old enough," Romelle mumbled against Keith's hair. She squeezed his ribs again with inhuman strength. "I miss him."

Keith forced himself to relax. Shoulders, arms... He let out a deep breath and drew another in. Romelle got lonely — he knew that — and longed for her family. This was fine, but no one else—

"Cuddle puddle on Keith's bed!" Rizavi declared, and jumped in as if cannonballing into a pool.

Romelle shrieked directly into Keith's ear and giggled as they bounced, squeezing him tight enough to expel air from his lungs. Rizavi rolled in on Keith's other side and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, like a cat. He felt himself tensing up again. Pidge wedged herself in by Keith's head, and Leifsdottir somehow remained poised for observation even as she jigsawed herself among three sets of feet.

Kinkade snapped a picture.

"Oh damn," Hunk said. "You know the love potion's working when Lance doesn't even complain that you're in a pile of ladies and he's not."

"He's welcome to it," Keith grumbled, plotting how he'd get ahold of that film and destroy it. "I don't even wanna be here."

Pidge flicked the back of his skull. "Friends can cuddle, Keith."

"Well, Shiro would like cuddling with me more," Lance said, sticking his tongue out at Keith. "I'm not 150 pounds of angst dressed up as a human being."

Griffin threw a crumpled up piece of paper that hit Lance precisely in the center of his forehead. "You have five minutes before _I_ go cuddle with Shiro. I bet he'd actually be quiet."

Keith fixed him with a steady glare — perhaps not as intimidating as he intended, because he had to duck around Rizavi's arm, hand-feeding Romelle a bean. "Don't you fucking dare."

"Uuuughhhhh." Romelle shuddered. _"Anchovy."_

"You're welcome to our dorm," Rizavi offered, around a bean of her own. She rarely complained about the flavors, and this was no exception. "No one's in there."

"Thanks, it would be nice if I could _go up the fucking stairs,"_ Griffin shot back. "Doesn't _anyone_ else care about this Transfiguration essay?"

Keith looked around the room. He'd written his during History of Magic this morning. Leifsdottir finished most of her homework before it was even assigned, having worked out lesson plans based off projections from previous years. Kinkade wasn't gonna be doing any more transfiguration work for a couple of weeks, Pidge and Hunk had a study group yesterday, and Rizavi would probably wing it over breakfast tomorrow.

And Lance certainly wasn't about to be doing anything productive tonight.

"Nope," Keith answered — Griffin was probably done anyway, and just being a stickler over grammar.

"It's been a trying day, but that's no excuse to neglect your studies." Allura appeared at their threshold, holding an armful of fluffy black cat.

"But we _are_ studying," Pidge argued.

"Studying the effects of B. Kaltenecker's love potions," Leifsdottir said.

"I can't very well object to that." Allura stepped fully into the room. She found an empty corner to sit on Keith's bed and placed Black — docile as a sleepy kitten in her hands — on his chest. A few strokes of her hands over the cat's sleek back won a rumbling purr that filled the hollow of Keith's chest. "Shiro didn't want you to be alone tonight, but I see he needn't have worried."

"But now he'll be alone," Keith pointed out.

"He'll be fine; he was just going to sleep when I left. He was concerned about you." At Romelle's pleading look, Allura pulled her feet up into bed and curled up with the rest of them. Her cheek ended up resting against the crown of Keith's head and she glanced over at Lance, sprawled out on his own bed and paying her no attention whatsoever. "Interesting," she said.

"Jellybean?" Rizavi held a frighteningly magenta bean aloft.

"Thank you Nadia, but not now," Allura said. "We've dealt with more than our share of drugged sweets today, you see."

Rizavi shrugged and popped the bean into her own mouth. "Fair." She offered one to Keith next; he rolled it between his fingers contemplatively. On the off-chance it had been tampered with, wouldn't it just cancel out whatever was currently running through his veins? Then maybe he could convince Shiro that everything was normal after all?

"You said you have theories, Ina?" Pidge asked.

Keith put the bean in his mouth.

"Two candidates are statistically significant above all the others. One, Slav—"

Keith choked, and the sting of undiluted black peppercorns shot through his lungs. As he coughed half a mangled bean back up, Black dug her claws into his chest for balance; once she'd decided not to move, it would take a greater force than Keith to dislodge her..

"I guess they say opposites attract?" Romelle, the traitor, mused.

"He provokes a heightened emotional state," Leifsdottir continued. "They frequently engage in passionate debate—"

"Because Slav pisses him off," Keith cut in. He couldn't listen to this crap.

"Shiro goes out of his way to join in conversation with Slav, and he's noticeably flustered when doing so. He is generally a composed speaker, but when speaking with Slav he makes errors in his speech at a 62% increase in frequency per minute."

"Because Slav _pisses him off,"_ Keith repeated.

"And that is divergent from Shiro's established pattern of behavior when displaying anger or frustration," Leifsdottir said. "He is able to maintain composure, focus on his goals, and support the people around him."

"Fine, but that doesn't mean Shiro's in love with Slav." Keith couldn't believe he was having this conversation.

"She didn't mention _anything_ about love," Pidge pointed out, smirking.

"I— He— Are you trying to say I'm in love with him?" Keith asked, incredulously. He had no idea until he'd hugged Shiro three hours ago, and shouldn't he be the one most aware of his own emotions?

Griffin snapped his transfiguration text shut. "Oh my god get over your stupid crush. I'm sick of having to pick up your slack whenever it looks like Shiro _might_ be in trouble."

"What."

"The _second_ a bludger goes off in his direction, you drop everything to fly to his rescue—"

"It makes strategic sense," Keith insisted. "He's the best scorer we have—"

"No, the _seeker_ is the best scorer we have—"

"For a fraction of the game. The only time Lance needs my help is when _the entire other team_ is chasing him down when going after the snitch."

"Thanks, man. I think," Lance said.

"Shiro's also capable of _dodging,"_ Griffin countered. "He's almost as batshit a flyer as you."

Leifsdottir jumped in. "89.6% of the time he's able to evade bludgers without assistance."

But that still left 10.4%. "Sendak targets him, you know he does."

"That is accurate," she confirmed.

Griffin rolled his eyes. "Yeah, but last time we played against Hufflepuff."

"Also accurate."

"It's so fucking obvious. I don't know how you keep trying to deny it." Griffin ran his hands through his hair, pushing back the flippy part of his bangs, and sat back in his chair with a huff.

Keith didn't come out to have a good time, but he felt so, so attacked. "Whatever I feel like doesn't matter," he said, shutting his eyes, "because he doesn't see me like that."

Maybe Lance had a better chance with Shiro than he did, after all. 

"Ina," Allura said cautiously, "you have two theories, correct? Could you tell us about the other?"

Leifsdottir nodded once and started rolling to a new section of her scroll — it was so long that the other end hit the floor. "The other likely individual is Keith."

"Huh?" Keith said, intelligently.

Romelle shifted so she was sitting a little straighter. "Do tell us more," she said. "All the details."

Leifsdottir was all too happy to oblige. "Shiro typically maintains unbroken eye contact with Keith for 3.4 seconds longer than his average across all other classmates. He regularly initiates physical contact among his friends, especially with members of the quidditch team, but even when taking that into consideration Keith is an outlier. He touches Keith 2.6 times more frequently than Pidge, who ranks second in this measurement. The average duration—"

"Oh, and then there was the thing you told me about!" Rizavi said. She threw a bean that might've hit Griffin in the forehead, but he snatched it out of the air and threw it back. It bounced off her shoulder and landed on Keith's face. "You said Keith took his shirt off after practice and Shiro just about swallowed his own tongue."

No way that was true; Keith would've noticed. Sure enough, Griffin denied it. "I never said that," he said. 

"—in the past week alone, I've observed nineteen instances where Shiro maintained contact with Keith for over a minute," Leifsdottir continued. "Including last Wednesday when they were studying together in the common room and Shiro was lying down with his foot in Keith's lap for at least 37 minutes." She looked up from her notes. "They were like that when I returned from the library, so I am unsure when it started."

That wasn't what she thought it was. "You're supposed to keep a sprain elevated," Keith said. He didn't know why he was arguing anymore. No one was listening to him. 

"Merlin's _taint._ Do you keep notes like that on everyone, or is Shiro special?" Lance narrowed his eyes. "Wait, do _you_ like him, too?"

Leifsdottir summoned an additional flurry of scrolls from her bag. "I keep notes on everyone, but I've taken a greater interest in Shiro because there's a total of twenty-three galleons, eight sickles, and a knut wagered on the outcome of his romantic prospects, at last tally. Data is only ever useful."

"Yeah, that's so not true, and the bet's off anyway," Hunk said.

"Maybe for you," Pidge, Rizavi, and Kinkade said, all at the same time.

But Keith was still stuck on one thing. "We're just friends. Like brothers."

"Man, I don't think that word means what you think it means," Hunk said.

"Yeah. Not a valid interpretation of the data," Pidge said.

"But we're—"

"Bet's changing," Lance declared. "I'm the one who's gonna win—"

Griffin finally lost it. "For fuck's sake. If I find you a sleeping potion will it get you to _shut up?"_

The sleeping potion was, in fact, effective at getting Lance to shut up. After everyone else came down from the excitement and sugar high, Keith still laid awake. He usually fell asleep just as quickly as he woke, but not tonight. Maybe it was Lance's whistling snores, or Pidge's cold toes against his leg, or the flutter of Romelle's breath through his hair. Maybe it was the memory of Shiro curled around him, of morning light caught in his eyelashes as he blinked himself awake.

He shifted restlessly and Rizavi mumbled something about lethifolds.

The grumbling hum Shiro made when he didn't want to wake in the morning, the sharp intake of his breath when Keith approached him too silently and startled him with a hand on his shoulder. The soft sounds of concern when they took inventory of their bruises after practice, the stifled groan when he prodded at one that was especially tender—

A wave of heat rolled over him like a rising tide, embarrassment and something else he didn't want to admit. He was being a bad friend. Shiro— Shiro wouldn't want this.

Would Shiro want anything to do with him by tomorrow? 

* * *

Soft images of Shiro faded from Keith's eyes when the thump of their door closing broke through his doze. A dream, it must've been a dream. Shiro wearing an impossibly fond smile, lit up by the bright morning light. Shiro's hands touching his face, his hair.

But he wasn't there. Keith's chest filled with an empty ache only moments after waking. He tried to roll onto his side, curl in on himself, but he was still at the bottom of a pile of five girls. Somehow, Rizavi and Allura had entirely swapped places in the night, Romelle was clinging to him like a barnacle, Leifsdottir was softly murmuring what sounded like numbers, and Pidge was snoozing away in a puddle of drool that came dangerously close to Keith's face.

Black, like Shiro, was nowhere to be seen. It was stupid to feel abandoned by a cat, of all creatures — especially Black, who was a force of her own — but today Keith knew he was an idiot.

Not as much of an idiot as some people, at least.

"Oh god. Oh fuck," Lance said, finally sitting up in bed and scrubbing at his eyes.

Pidge didn't let her grogginess get in the way of a friendly jab. "Good morning, _Loverboy Lance,"_ she said around a yawn.

Keith moved through the morning as if in a fog, floating adrift without Shiro's brightness to orient himself. He sipped at a cup of pumpkin juice at breakfast, unable to stomach much more. He stared defiantly back at Iverson when he turned in his homework with the remnants of Lance's romantic masterpiece still scribbled on the back. In Charms, his pineapple wouldn't dance to anything more lively than a slow twirl, as if listening to a funerary dirge. And, though Keith's head popped up like a groundhog every few minutes to search for him, Shiro was nowhere to be found at lunch.

"You doing okay, buddy?" Hunk asked, cautiously, and Keith just grumbled through a mouthful of sandwich.

When Care of Magical Creatures was interrupted by the escape of the baby erumpent Coran had somehow acquired, Keith finally gave in and asked.

"I ran into him like an hour ago," Lance said. "He asked if the potion wore off yet, and I was like _yeah,_ no offense but I can't look at him for a while. I thought things I can't unsee. I need, like, an obliviate and an entire bottle of—"

"Lance. Where'd he go?"

Lance only shrugged, but Keith thought he saw something beyond him, a little speck out in the distant sky. After class ended, he chased after it. 

Shiro stood out starkly against the clear, bright sky, a dark speck zooming around high above the quidditch pitch. Keith watched him for a moment, taking note of the soft swoop in his stomach at the mere sight of his best friend. That feeling had been there for a long time, he realized — and the pound of his pulse in his wrists, and the trill in his heart, and the urge to leap into the sky to be by his side forevermore.

He turned his attention to the broom shed. Their teachers discovered years ago that neither he nor Shiro considered a detention spent together to be a punishment, and that was when the measures designed to make them behave got more creative. This door didn't respond to a simple alohomora anymore, and that realization was what made them put a hell of a lot more effort into not being caught.

He prodded at the spell and untangled it as he'd done hundreds of times before; the charm on the case holding the quidditch balls was simpler, and within moments he had an awakened, struggling snitch in his hands.

Neither of them were seekers anymore. Headmistress Sanda kicked Shiro out of the position as a liability after a single season full of overly risky maneuvers. She would've kicked him off the team entirely if the other professors hadn't stepped in. Keith could've been his replacement if he had a better broom, but that was an orphan's lot — scholarship money and too few possessions that were truly his own. No amount of talent or training could compensate for the sluggish school broom he rode, but other positions weren't solely about speed.

Still, the snitch chase held a point of nostalgia in his heart. This kind of practice was how they became friends, in secret, after curfew. Things were simpler back then — or had it only felt that way?

Keith strolled out to the center of the field — snitch clutched in one fist, illegally modified school broom in the other — and waited. His stomach churned. Shiro promised he would be there in the morning, but he’d avoided Keith all day. Maybe it didn’t mean what he feared it did. He was out here, a spot where he and Keith frequently met, flying restless circles in the sky. It was something Shiro did when he had too much nervous energy, when he couldn’t get his brain to shut up. Keith knew where to look to see his anxiety — the unrest in his silhouette, the tension in his shoulders as he slowed to a gentle loop, spiraling downwards. Was he nervous because he was planning to cut off his friendship with Keith, or for another reason entirely?

"Shouldn't you be in class?" he called down, when he was maybe ten feet above Keith's head.

Keith kicked off from the ground. The two of them circled each other slowly, and the space left something twisting unpleasantly, low in Keith's stomach.

"Don't care. Not taking potions next year," he answered.

"Keith—" Shiro’s forehead creased, conflicted, like he still cared. "You have your OWLs this year. You should take it more seriously—"

"Hey, don't be sore just because you _voluntarily_ took Slav for two more years," Keith teased with feigned confidence. It got a twitch from Shiro's lips. "But seriously—" he couldn't help the pitch of his voice, honest and raw— "you're more important to me than any class."

"I know," Shiro said, closed off again.

Did that come out wrong, too? It was a frustration Keith didn't know how to remedy; he couldn't make his words carry every meaning he wanted them to, unused to communicating with any kind of intent. It never mattered to him before, but with Shiro… _everything_ was important, with Shiro.

"We don't have to talk about it right now," Keith said, deflating. Shiro hadn’t told him to leave, and that would have to be enough for now. They'd talk eventually, but first Shiro needed to relax. He pulled the snitch from his pocket; Shiro's eyes lit up when he recognized it. With more bravado than he felt, Keith said, "Think you can keep up with me?"

"Oh, I don't know," Shiro said, and _that_ look sent a pleasant shiver over the surface of Keith's skin. "I'll do my best."

It was a familiar game, but the new heat rushing through Keith's veins cast a different hue to his anticipation. He released the snitch. They began to circle each other for a silent count of thirty, as was their custom before dashing to the search. Shiro tied his heavy winter cloak behind his back so it wouldn't billow out behind him and slow him down. Keith just dropped his into the snow — he'd make sure this was over quickly, and then once they were back on the ground he could heat himself up with spells.

They both took off in the same instant, searching in different directions. Keith kept half an eye on Shiro as he searched, even though he knew it was strategically useless; when they were far apart like this, it was impossible to catch up to any lead the other might claim, but he still liked to watch the way Shiro moved. He'd known for a long time that the feelings Shiro displayed on his face were only a fraction of the whole. So many of his expressions and words fell victim to his desire to appear dependable to anyone who might need him. He lost that composure in the air. The unbridled joy of flight was a beautiful thing on Shiro's face; compared to that brightness, Keith hadn't considered the true depths of all the rest that must be down there, hidden away.

Was it his imagination, or was Shiro stealing glances back at him, too?

Keith had never felt so confident or so terrified, and he'd never before wanted to _win_ as much as he did in that moment. To meet Shiro's challenge with his own, to have that heated look directed his way. Nothing surrounded them except for cloudless sky, painted orange with the setting sun. No glint of metal, no buzz of tiny wings. He circled higher, searching below for any hint of movement — then dove, just to catch Shiro's attention.

It worked. Shiro darted over to see what Keith had spotted — absolutely nothing — and Keith pulled out of the dive early to flip and twirl around him. Not quite a Wronski feint — the last time Lance goaded him into trying it out in practice, they'd both plowed straight into the ground and then spent the night in the hospital wing. Not what he wanted to remind Shiro of just now.

"Show-off," Shiro teased, swatting at Keith's shoulder as he sped by.

Keith spun around just to stick his tongue out at him, and it was a good thing he did, otherwise he wouldn't've noticed Shiro charging at him. He tumbled upside-down on his broom to avoid the shoulder check Shiro threw his way, but righted himself a little too quickly. Shiro _somehow_ got him in a headlock and they tussled for a moment in the rapidly darkening sky, until Keith won his freedom by getting his fingers into Shiro's ticklish sides.

They parted, gasping laughter, color rising high in Shiro's cheeks.

"Don't tell me model student Takashi Shirogane only follows the rules when other people are watching," Keith said, as deadpan as he could manage while struggling to catch his breath. His attention fixed on Shiro, soft. Shiro, laughing. 

His only warning was a slight widening of Shiro's eyes before he bolted off past him. Keith turned and followed without thought. It wasn't a ruse this time — off in the distance, glimmering metal caught the last dregs of sunlight. He was far behind. School brooms turned slowly; it took planning to get them to spin, and he'd had no time to prepare. But the Snitch was more nimble than a person could ever be. Keith, following, was able to take a more direct path, and with each change in direction, Shiro lost some of his lead until he was again close enough to touch.

The snitch dove and they followed, corkscrewing around each other in a dance only the two of them knew.

The sky, now deep purple streaked with burnished orange, swirled together with the pristine snow as they spun. The glittering gold and fluttering wings of the snitch, inches away from the reach of his fingertips. Shiro's brows angled in concentration, his eyes alive with the excitement of a challenge, his mouth curled into a cocky smirk. His arms were longer, his fingertips brushing up against the tip of a wing, but _he_ was well within Keith's reach. Would it always be so?

Keith pounced, Shiro yelped, and they both _floomphed_ down into the deep snow.

Shiro's heart raced along rabbit-quick against Keith's ear, and his chest was warm under Keith's cheek. He laughed, low and stunned, and Keith squeezed his arms around him. _Don't make me let go,_ he silently pleaded.

"I almost had it," Shiro scolded, but there wasn't any heat to it. He dug his fingers into Keith's hair and made a mess of it, but Keith didn’t mind. He pushed his head up into Shiro’s hand, and he allowed it. 

"I learned from the best," Keith retorted, just a little bit smug. The stunt that got Shiro banned from Seeking? He'd jumped off his goddamn broom a hundred feet above ground, grabbed the Snitch to secure a Gryffindor win, and then caught back onto his broom just in time to skim the ground and circle the stands, holding their victory aloft.

"I stuck the landing better." True. "And I never jumped off my broom to _tackle_ someone." Also true.

"I'll let you win some other time," Keith drawled, dragging his fingers threateningly close to the ticklish spots on Shiro's sides. 

_"Let_ me?" There was a dangerous indignation in Shiro's voice, and half a second later a puff of snow hit Keith in the face.

Keith blinked it out of his eyes and rose from Shiro's chest. Their friends agreed to an indefinite moratorium on snowball fights ever since he made Hunk cry in second year. "Did you forget?" Keith asked lowly, sticking his icy-cold fingers under the collar of Shiro's shirt.

Shiro grinned up at him. "Forget what?" Another handful of snow smacked him in the face, and as Keith attacked he realized nothing had changed. Not at its core. Only, Keith was now aware of all the possibilities.

They tumbled ass-over-ears through the snow, until Keith let Shiro pin him to the ground just to see his triumphant grin.

"Got you."

"Yeah, you did," Keith said, reaching up for his face.

Shiro flinched at the touch of his freezing hands but, seeing that the fight was over, pushed his cheek back into Keith's hand. He carefully pillowed his palms against Shiro's cheeks and let his fingers stroke through Shiro's hair; Shiro looked down at him softly. Maybe the others were right — maybe he wanted this, too.

"I still feel the same," Keith said as he sat halfway up, then guided their mouths together; his heart settled and pounded all at once. It wasn't desperate, not hungry, nor burning so brightly that it wouldn't last the night. Shiro kissed him like it was something he did every day — or at least like he wanted to, every day. The world didn't tilt on its axis as their mouths moved together, as Shiro opened to him, giving Keith every opportunity to deepen the kiss. He didn't take it just yet. Kissing Shiro felt like coming home, the kind of assurance Keith spent eight years longing for, and that was perhaps even more profound.

Keith drew back to try another angle, then another — one kiss turned to two, to three, to half a dozen. He reveled in this gentle intimacy that he'd never known before. He hadn't known it was possible to feel this connected to another person, or that it could feel so good.

Later, after the rest of the House was asleep, they'd have the chance to heat each other up before the fire. Later, when Lotor came storming up to them after a failed Slytherin quidditch practice, they'd realize that they never caught or returned that Snitch.

For now — "Again?" Keith murmured, and let Shiro claim his lips again and again and again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading - I sometimes struggle to reply to comments because anxiety, but please know I see and love all of them. 
> 
> If you would like to reblog/retweet, here is the post on [tumblr 1,](https://peggycarterisacat.tumblr.com/post/189814898718/love-in-idleness-sheith-rated-t-21k-words) [tumblr 2,](https://shadowedplums.tumblr.com/post/189814841260/heres-my-piece-for-the-sheithbigbang) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/shadowedplums/status/1208853420066533376)
> 
> Also, in light of JKR's recent bullshit, please consider showing some love for [Harry Potter fanworks with trans characters. ](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Trans+Character&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&tag_id=Harry+Potter+-+J*d*+K*d*+Rowling) Harry Potter is so important to so many people, and we can make the fandom a loving and accepting place no matter what her beliefs are.


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